I get WAY too excited about setting goals for myself. There’s something about making plans–for my writing career, for projects I want to complete, and for self-improvement–that soothes my anxious mind. Although change and I aren’t friends, as I’ve blogged about before, I do find it deeply satisfying to work toward changes of my own making, especially when I can clearly see how those changes will benefit me.
But for all the time that I’ve spent setting and working toward various personal and professional goals over the last few years, I’ve spent almost no time at all thinking about what I want from my life or how my goals will help me get there. I like to be busy and I need to be constantly working on something, which means I’ve often fallen into the trap of setting a ton of goals that weren’t actually important to my career or my happiness or my values, or just didn’t align with the life I’ve envisioned for myself at all.
Then I stumbled across this article on The Financial Diet that was written by a woman who used a life audit to help her figure out where to direct her time and energy in the coming year. A life audit is really just a fancy way to describe the process of evaluating the life that you currently have and making plans or setting intentions that will bring you closer to the life you want to have, but that article was the first time I’d ever stumbled across the term before, and it proved to be a real game changer for me. It helped me to recognize my tendency toward setting goals that sound cool or feel important regardless of how much they actually matter to me. And it gave me a jumping off point to use when evaluating my own life at present and making my own plans for 2019.
If a little (or a lot) of self evaluation sounds like just what the doctor ordered, then I’d recommend reading this article and this one to get a better feel for what, specifically, a life audit involves, as well as how you might proceed. When I sat down to do my own, I pulled both articles up on my computer, got out a pad of post-its and one of my good pens, and set to brainstorming. For almost two hours, I jotted down every goal, pipe dream, and intention I could think of on individual pieces of paper, with occasional breaks to stretch or skim the articles in question for ideas. Other writers might advise that you begin grouping your post-its into categories right away, but I let mine sit for a few days. I was pretty burned out following my mega-brainstorming session, and the short break kept the audit feeling fun and fresh instead of like tedious work. Plus, I was confident that I’d come up with a few additional goals/dreams/intentions that I’d skipped over or forgotten in the initial brainstorming frenzy if I gave my subconscious a little more time to work, and I was right.
By the time I’d finished sorting and grouping my post-it notes, I had 100 post-its and eleven categories: writing, work, health (physical, mental, emotional, financial), marriage, family and friends, travel, future projects, hobbies, things I want to do, lifestyle, and mantras. I’d also marked each post-it in each category with at least one symbol–an arrow for things I want to tackle or begin tackling in 2019, a star for things I want to do at some point in the future, and a heart for the things I intend to continuously prioritize. Once I’d finished my sorting, I listed each category in a journal along with how many stars, arrows, and hearts each category contained. Being able to see all of my data at once showed me which areas of my life I should be focusing on changing–i.e. which had the most stars and arrows–and which I was more or less happy with.
The writing category, for example, contained both a large amount of post-its and a large amount of arrows, which wasn’t a big surprise. I have a lot of goals/dreams for my writing, and I knew at the end of last year that I wanted to start working on a bunch of them in the immediate future. I had very few post-its in the hobbies category, on the other hand, but almost all of those post-its had arrows too. Most of my hobby-related goals involved getting back into this thing or this other thing that I haven’t prioritized recently, and I now know that I want to be much more mindful about cultivating those hobbies going forward. There were also a few categories, namely family/friends and travel, where I had very few post-its and very few arrows or stars. Because I tend to prioritize my relationships with the people I’m close to as a rule, there’s less I want to change or improve upon. Same goes for the trips that I take.
Knowing which aspects of my life I am generally content with and which aspects I’m most keen to change gave me the guidance I needed to set meaningful resolutions and make a meaningful business plan for myself in 2019. Although it’s obviously too soon to know for sure whether I’ll accomplish all my goals, I’m already confident that I’ll be spending far more of my time and energy this year on the things that matter most to me.
Have you ever done a life audit? Having read this post, would you consider doing one? Let me know in the comments!