Evaluate Your Life in 5 Steps.
Do you feel like you’re spinning your wheels in life? Are you feeling frustrated, burned out, or out of whack? Do you have goals in a variety of areas of your life, but you’re not making progress? You look around and wonder why is everyone else around you making progress, succeeding, winning at life, but here you are still in the same damn place you were days, weeks, months, and maybe years ago? Do you find yourself avoiding everything and are simply…stuck? It may be time to stop—yes stop—and truly ask yourself whether you’re living a value-based life.
A value-based life is one where you are living out the ten areas of life (listed below) that matter most to you in your current season of life.
How to figure out if you’re living a value-based life.
Track how you spend your time for a week.
Every 15 minutes of the day, track how you spent that time. Were you working, studying, reading, spending time with your significant other, watching tv, playing with your kids, working out, sleeping, etc. Try to list it as specifically as possible. Every day for a full week. Keep in mind, we are not striving for perfection, but a rough estimate.
Rank how important, on a scale of 1 (you could careless about it) to 10 (super important), each of the ten values are to you in the current season of your life:
Parenting
Intimate relationships
Family relationships
Social relationships
Physical Health
Mental health
Spirituality/Religion
Personal growth
Community involvement
Leisure and recreation
Work and career
Classify the time you spent over the last week into the eleven values.
Look back at your tracked time and classify each 15-minute block into one of the eleven values. Don’t know where to put sleep? Put it under physical health. Then add up how many minutes you spent in each of the eleven values.
Rank order the time spent eleven values.
List them from the most time spent to the least time spent.
Compare your rankings from steps 2 and 4:
Do your rankings match? Meaning, if you spent the most time on leisure and recreation and you have that value ranked the highest in step 4, then WOO HOO! You are living a value-based life! Stop reading this article and continue thriving!
Do your rankings not match? Meaning, how you spent your time rankings do not mirror in some way your believed value rankings. Then welcome to the club! Ain’t no shame in that, but go read part two of this series, 7 Steps for Living a Value-Based Life!