If you’ve never heard of this tool before, The Wheel of Life is a popular tool used to assess and improve balance and satisfaction in life. It involves considering different areas of life that are important to you and ranking each of them on a scale of 1 to 5 or 10. Once completed, you’re then able to see a visual representation of your life, what areas you are satisfied with and what areas you should put more focus on to feel more fulfilment and balance.
I tried this exercise for the first time a few years ago and it really helped me to set the right goals and put more focus on areas that I wanted to improve. This, in turn, enabled me to live with more intention and also improved my overall quality of life.
Here is a quick step-by-step guide that will allow you to create your own Wheel of Life and hopefully design a lifestyle that brings more fulfilment and balance into your life:
Step 1:
First, start by identifying all life areas that are important to you. The number of areas will be different for everyone but I can come up with a whopping 8 of them: Home, Career/Work, Relationships, Personal Finance, Personal Growth, Fun/Hobbies, Health/Fitness, Lifestyle, and My Passion Projects. If you’re doing this, keep in mind that you do not need to have that many, it’s fine if you only care about 3 areas of life, too!
Step 2:
You can download the Wheel of Life template off the Internet somewhere or create your own by grabbing a piece of paper, drawing a simple circle and dividing it into as many parts as areas of life you came up with. Once the circle is ready, you can start rating each area of life from 1 (unsatisfied) to 5 or 10 (highly satisfied). Below you can see an example of what I use (most of them look similar):
The strategy I use to rate/score each life area is that I start by considering all pluses and minuses in a given area which then let’s me decide what score it deserves. For example, a basic example could look like this:
- Work/Career:
Pluses:
- The job is quite interesting and varied.
- There are a lot of opportunities to grow.
- Culture is informal and feels like it’s just a group of friends working towards a common goal.
- The wage is decent.
Minuses (or what could be better):
- Need more flexibility.
- Want it to be fully remote.
- Need more holidays.
- Need less stress.
- Want to work on more meaningful and lasting projects that would leave a real impact on the world.
As you can see from the example above, there are pluses and minuses, which show that this area of life is quite decent but some improvements are desired to make it better. I’d suggest giving this area a score of 3, but the rating can differ from person to person, depending on how you value each different point. You should follow a similar process for all areas of your life and rate them accordingly.
Step 3:
Now that you have a pretty good idea of how you’d rate each area of your life, it’s time to visualise it on your Wheel of Life and figure out which areas are out of balance. Here’s what mine looks like:
Ideally, all areas of life will create a perfect circle and will be rated as 4 or 5 (or between 8 and 10 if you’re using a 1 to 10 scale). This would mean that your life is balanced and fulfilling for you. However, this is rarely the case unless you lead a lifestyle that allows you to focus and perform on all areas of life to the exact extent you want to.
As you can see, I rated most of my areas as 4. This is because even though I’m happy with how they are right now, there is a thing or two I’d still like to improve here and there before I can rate them as a solid 5. Some of them I scored 3, which is not a bad score but does show that I’m less satisfied with them when compared to the rest. For this reason, I’ll be focussing on these three specific areas and putting most of my effort into improving them next.
If you’re creating your own Wheel of Life, you might decide that you’re pretty happy with where you’re right now and nothing needs to be improved, or maybe you’ll want to improve all of them (which was the case for me when I create my Wheel Of Life the first time), or you might want to focus on some key areas more whilst maintaining or slightly improving the rest (pretty much my case right now).
Step 4:
If you followed my suggested process of rating each area of your life, then you’ll already know what each of them should ideally be like for you to feel fully happy and fulfilled.
If you didn’t follow the same process as I did, however, and simply scored each area as you felt without much thought then it’s time to go through all of them again and visualise/describe all the things you’d like to have/experience/feel that would make you rate all of your areas of life as a solid 5 (or 10).
For example, let’s say you rated your Relationships as 3. Describe what exactly you’d like to experience in this life area that would make you rate it as 5 (or 10). Would you like to have more meaningful relationships? Would you like to hang out with your friends a minimum of once per week? Would you like to expand your network of friends? etc.
Once you know what each area of your life ideally should look like, formalise some key goals you’d like to achieve for each of them in the near future (for example, within 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, etc).
If you want to improve your Relationships area, for example, your goals for the next year could look like this:
- Organise a fun outdoor activity with my closest friends at least once every 2 weeks.
- Reach out to old friends I rarely talk to at least once per month.
- Join and engage in relevant forums/groups where I could discover more like-minded people
- Host a dinner party for my closest friends once per month, etc.
You may create a long or short list of goals for each different area of your life, either is fine. I do recommend being realistic here, however, and taking into account how much time you expect to actually have left to progress with your goals outside of work and other life responsibilities.
If you have a long list of goals, you’ll end up having an even longer list of tasks to get done each week and day, too, and if you don’t have enough time to get them done, it’ll exhaust and demotivate you. As you may already know, it’s very important to find enough time to unwind, relax, chill, do nothing or do something very random regularly, and if this has not already been considered, you might want to put this as one of the goals/habits/tasks, too. 😃
Step 5:
The final step is to create a plan of action to achieve all the goals you set in step 4 and use some sort of tool to monitor and keep track of your progress. Consider using a goal or life planner, or maybe a monthly/weekly/daily planner or any simple journal to do this — whatever works best for you.
I’d recommend creating a list of tasks to do for each goal you have. Some goals may require only 1 or 2 tasks to get done to achieve, whereas some of them might be more complex and require several tasks that will need to be updated as you go and learn more information (e.g. you may not yet fully know how to achieve certain goals and more research is needed).
Once you have a long list of all the tasks for all the goals you set for each different area of your life, you can start planning how you will get them done in months to come.
The best way I found to do this is to select all the tasks you want to try to get done in month 1 (e.g. January) and create a joint list of all the tasks related to different goals and different areas of your life for that month.
Once you know what you will be focussing on in month 1, you then can start breaking down these monthly tasks into smaller, weekly tasks — your key priorities and things that would be nice to get done once your priorities are cleared. You might decide to plan one week at a time or all 4 weeks at once — it’s up to you. I personally plan one week at a time as things frequently change in my life and I’d likely need to keep updating and rewriting my weekly schedules if I did them all at once.
Finally, once you know your week’s priorities and tasks to get done, consider how much time and effort you expect you’ll need to complete them and space them out on your daily planner/schedule accordingly.
Repeat the same process for months 2, 3, 4, etc. until all your tasks have been completed and goals achieved.
Okay, so that’s pretty much for now. I hope I managed to explain the process properly and that you were able to follow along. It’s really a very good and helpful tool and it does make a difference if you follow through with it.
Words by: Lina Mileskaite