The Wheel of Life

First and foremost, Merry Christmas everyone!  I hope you have a fantastic day full of family, friends and love.

Today, I'll be discussing my Wheel of Life.  Last year, I had no idea where to begin with goal setting.  What specific steps did I need to take to rebuild?  How did I know how many to take?  That's when I discovered a little program called Wheel of Life.  By separating my life into eight key areas on a pie chart and shading each slice up to the point where I felt happy, I was able to determine not only the subjects I needed to focus on but the number of steps I should take to fulfill my life.

Here's last year's pie chart:

As you can see, I was all over the place.  The idea behind the Wheel of Life is that a wheel should be fairly circular to carry its cargo (ie You!).  This wheel wasn't getting me anywhere.  It was from this base that I created an easier-to-understand chart which I used for the rest of the year.

Of course, when I shaded my wheel last year, I did it off of an arbitrary "feeling."  This year, I wanted something a little more logical and easier to track.  I took a look back at my completed 2013 chart for reference:

According to this, I had ten steps left to achieve a full 100% for 2013.  Some of these were duplicates, such as "Lose Weight" compared to the two "Lose 15 Pounds," and "Meditate" in both Personal and Spiritual.  Subtracting those, I came up with a final eight steps left over.

In my December 10th post, I talked about how I'd like to get to a point where I only have two goals in each area for a total of 16 goals total.  I feel like that's a good basis to start with.

Here's what an ideal goal chart would look like:

With this in mind, I began adding steps left over from last year.  With four steps left in Financial, three in Health, and one in Spiritual after removing duplicates, I decided to simply plug in those exact blank steps into each section.  I ended up with something like this:

As you can see from my annotations, this chart is significantly better than last year.  Even in the two sections with the least amount of shaded blocks, I either improved or broke even.  The only reason I have sections in the negative is because I'm now implementing that two goal per section rule.  I hope to see a lot more pluses and equal signs at the end of 2014.

It seems I don't need to access the Wheel of Life program anymore, but I would suggest it if you're just starting out!  You can download the program here. 

I think I'm going to go ahead and jump right into my Career section today.  Give me a bit to get that post up!  And again, Merry Christmas!