blog to discovery

A wheel of life aims to highlight the areas of your life that you need to give more attention (or areas where you need to give less) so you can work towards a balanced life. I like the approach because it is a simple graphical representation, so I started using the method on a monthly basis to track progress on my goals.

Photograph by PatCastaldo

I started giving scores based on how I felt about each area, but thought this was too variable, so started counting up the number of times I worked on tasks in each area. Although this was tricky to track it did give unambiguous figures to plot. However,  on reviewing after a few months, I realised I was measuring the wrong thing; I was plotting how many times I worked in each area not by what I achieved, for example I could spend a lot of time sorting out my address book, but it isn’t as satisfying that I was developing  relationships as much as if I had a long telephone call with a friend .

In a simplistic view, habits define your life. They are the little things that you do each day without thinking and enable you to focus on other things. Think how much less time you would have if you had to focus on breathing, driving or typing. Therefore it is essential that your habits connect with your goals, otherwise you are going to find it very difficult to meet them and it will frequently feel that you are fighting against yourself.

Recognising the ‘bad’ habits

The difficulty with habits is, by their nature of being a subconscious activity, is you don’t always recognise them as habits; and certainly in my life I’ve recently noticed several ‘bad’ habits have formed without me even realising.

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.”

Recently it has become increasingly clear of the importance of my goal to have multiple sources of income including passive income as my main income stream maybe threatened.

I’ve been tracking the sources and level of my income since the beginning of April 2009 and the results are interesting, and slightly scary.

Sources of income

In the last 12 months I’ve had 5 sources of income:

• salary / maternity pay
• interest
• dividends
• selling investments
• gifts

This is slightly more than I estimated in April 2009 when I suggested my sources of income were salary (maternity pay), interest and from my blog. You will notice that blog is not on my list as I am waiting to receive my next payment.

It’s easy to identify an action or goal; sometimes it’s easy to complete them and cross them off your list. However, it is the maintenance actions that really make a difference. For instance, in terms of losing my pregnancy weight I could just think about reaching my pre-pregnancy weight, but the real desired outcome is to maintain that weight. This means when I reach that weight I don’t stop exercising, instead I move to the maintenance level of exercise and diet.

This is currently on my mind because I am in the process of reinstalling software on to my laptop after I reformatted at the weekend. Yes, less than two months since I bought it. After buying the laptop, my first tasks were to remove Vista and install XP, remove the preinstalled  software I didn’t want and to install AVG antivirus. Then I moved on to the business of installing other software and moving across my files.

Writing down your goals is good, but of course it is even better to take action to help realise the goals. When I announced the second draft of my goals, Gary asked how often I considered them. This got me thinking; I intend to review them at the end of each month using a wheel of life, but was this good enough? I decided that as well as a regular review, I also needed a regular reminder of my goals.

I created desktop wallpaper for my laptop depicting each of my goals,  so I am reminded of them whenever I use my laptop. This was a task I could have spent a long time on by finding the perfect pictures and learning how to use photoshop to get the perfect layout. Instead I put something together very quickly finding the best pictures I could and over time I intend to update it when I find better pictures.  This means the wallpaper isn’t as pretty as it could be and some of the images are a bit of a loose connection to the goal, but as it is acting as a reminder to me it is doing its job.

I started drawing regular wheel of life diagrams in 2007, although it has been several months since my last one. I’ve been thinking about introducing them as a regular exercise again so I thought I should review the method for its usefulness before adding something else to my to do list.

Background to wheel of life

The idea behind the wheel of life exercise is to ensure there is balance in your life. By plotting how you perceive you are doing in each area of your life you easily see how balanced or unbalanced your life is, and how this changes over time.  Even if you don’t want all parts of your life to have the same value you can use it by plotting the values for how you would like your life as well as your current position.

Having developed your goals its important to review them at a later date, particularly after any major changes in your life, to ensure they are still relevant; you don’t want to be working towards something you no longer want. Plus it is a useful reminder to ensure you are making progress.

I only developed a first draft of my goals in August 2008, but since then I’ve given birth to my first child so my life has changed significantly. Although I wrote my draft knowing I was pregnant, I had no idea what it was going to be like being a mother, so after four months I now feel ready to review my goals. Plus I’ve now had almost half of my maternity leave and would like to spend some of the remaining time to progress  my goals.

My first draft vision

I have been working on my goals for a long time but seemed to stall at identifying what my top level vision was. Looking back on my notes it appears that I’ve had the content nearly there for a long time, but the thing that seemed to be stopping me was how to actually write my vision.

I have decided to use the format suggested by Jim Collins for organisation’s vision in his book Built to Last, which I remembered from the dissertation for my management diploma a few years ago.

The concept

According to Jim Collins a good vision consists of two components:

• Core ideology – what we stand for and why we exist
• Envisioned future – what we aspire to become, to achieve, to create

Time really does go quickly when you’re busy and I can’t believe it has been a month since I last did this exercise. Unfortunately, because I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to put the effort into progressing my wheel, however I feel most things are the same as last month although I have marked a few as slipping backwards.

During the last month, I suffered a headache for almost a week, which I just could not shift. When I saw my chiropractor she told me my back was doing really well, but because I have been stressed at work I have been tensing my jaw which had caused the headache, within a few moments my jaw was manipulated and my headache was gone.