This post is a summary of a ‘Wheel of Life’ exercise I did at the start of November

At the start of November I made a list of different areas of my life:

  • Security
    • Physical Health
    • Mental Health
    • Money/Assets
  • Love
    • Partner and Children
    • Scarisbrick Family
    • Friends
  • Adventure
    • TMC
    • Work EQT
    • Play
    • Work Rhul

I picked a three month timescale and wrote up a scoring system for each area. Sentences like: “If my physical health was 10/10 on February the first I would be regularly running; weigh less than 78kg; be doing Judo twice a week and have given blood twice.” (The actual scoring is much more complex than this because I overthink/overcomplicate everything).

I’m two and a bit months into the three month period, so let’s see how I’m doing

  • Security

    • Physical Health - 8/10 - I’m quietly pleased with my exercise at the moment. Restarting Judo was very big for me.

    • Mental Health - 9/10 - I feel like I’m in an excellent place. I’m certainly dealing better with some big uncertainties but I feel like I’m in better shape than I have been for years.

    • Money/Assets - 4.9/10 - this is the lowest score, and it’s mostly driven by a combination of ambitious targets and a few rough months at work (I also didn’t tick off ‘release book’)

  • Love
    • Partner and Children - 8/10 - Everybody is doing pretty well. We had a good Christmas, Holidays are booked, Kat and I have been finding time to go on little dates. Honestly really good.
    • Scarisbrick Family - 8/10 - we’ve had some lovely visits from my parents, but didn’t managed to organise one from Richard before 1st Feb. I’ve been emailing various cousins and so on.
    • Friends - 8/10 - I have a general feeling of ‘I should see friends more’ but we’ve been a lot more social since the summer, so I think we’re definately doing better. I’d like to be so much more organised about this.
  • Adventure
    • TMC - 5/10 - struggling to get anything to work.
    • Work (EQT) - 4/10 - I’m in the middle of a real run of ‘things NOT working’. I remain optimistic, but this needs a change.
    • Play - 8.3/10 - I was conflicted about this one because I don’t feel that playful, but actually: I’m reading a lot more; watching more challenging films; doing judo; and I fitted in some PS4 time over Christmas. I’m definately making more use of my leisure time. On the other hand - I’m going to have much less lesuire time over the next year, and I’d like to have done a lot more photography and cookery.
    • Work (RHUL)- I didn’t set any goals for this one.

Thoughts

There are two things that are obvious when I look at this:

  • All the scores seem high to me because they are from a baseline of two months ago, and the changes already seem `normal’ to me. Of course, that’s the point of the whole exercise - to be able to see the progress.
  • My opinions of the scores (which I have a pretty objective process to reach) vary wildly depending on my general mood at the time)