It’s an assessment of each aspect of your life, from work and finances to relationships and life goals. It encourages you to reflect on each aspect of your life so you can identify what makes you happy and what’s been draining your energy.

Once completed, you should have a clear idea of what you want from life and how to spend more time focusing on the things you love.

When’s the Right Time for a Life Audit?

Anyone can do a life audit at any time. Having said that, it’s most beneficial for those who are feeling a bit out of balance or like they’ve lost direction and purpose.

Signs that you could benefit from a life audit are:

• Your daily activities aren’t aligning with your life goals.
• You have no clear direction.
• You’re frequently stressed.
• You don’t have enough time to do what you love.
• You’re feeling dissatisfied with your life.
• You’re lacking motivation for your daily tasks.
• You’re thinking about making a big life change.

While a life audit is undoubtedly a useful exercise, a note of warning: if you’re experiencing persistent low mood, depression or anxiety, it’s vital that you seek professional help, such as advice from a trained therapist, doctor or mental health specialist. Your employer might provide an employee assistance programme as a first step.

What Are the Benefits of a Life Audit?

An overriding benefit of life auditing is clarity. By reflecting on your current circumstances and what you’d like your life to look like, you can become clearer about what changes you need to make to achieve your goals.

If you are feeling lost, unhappy, or out of balance, a life audit can also help you to pinpoint where your negative feelings are coming from, as well as the things you gain most joy from, regardless of societal expectations.

How to Carry Out a Life Audit

Before you begin, here are some important top tips that will help you to get the most out of your life audit:

• Find a quiet, private space.
• Don’t put any time constraints on the process (it takes as long as it takes!).
• Be completely honest.
• Get your thoughts down on paper (you can’t properly audit your life in your head).

Now, follow these five steps to carry out your life audit:

1. Rate Your Life

Start by brainstorming the key aspects of your life. Then rate them using a scale of 1-10, with 1 referring to areas of very low satisfaction, stress and overwhelm, while 10 refers to areas of high joy and satisfaction.

You can choose any aspect of your life you want, but in general key areas you could focus on might include your:

• Current career.
• Financial situation.
• Family life.
• Romantic relationships.
• Friendships.
• Mental health.
• Physical health.
• Hobbies.
• Personal growth and education.
• Home.
• Travel and adventure.

It’s essential to be completely honest with yourself here, which is why we suggest doing your audit alone. You don’t want the judgment of others to affect your ratings.

2. Identify Your Dream Life

Imagine yourself a year or two from now. What would your dream life look like?

Don’t worry about what others may think. In fact, drop all societal beliefs and particularly avoid doing things only to impress others. Your life audit is a judgment-free zone.

If you’re struggling to imagine your dream life or aren’t sure what you want it to look like, revisit the aspects of your life that you analyzed in step one and write down what your dream scenario would be for each.

Skip any that aren’t relevant to your happiness and focus on the things you identified that made you feel excited about the possibilities your future could hold.

3. Get Rid of Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are those that keep your dreams pushed to the bottom of your priority list.

For example, you might think you don’t have enough money to travel abroad, even though it’s what you desperately want to do.

Get rid of that negativity! Reframe it into a challenge that you want to overcome.

Maybe you could start by researching how other people manage the expense of long-term travel and explore options that are possible for you, like remote working, taking a sabbatical, or setting some financial savings goals.

4. Reframe Your Life to Suit Your Dreams

Now it’s time to make some real changes. Look at the areas of your life where satisfaction is really low and work out what you could do to bring that score up.

For example, if you’ve discovered your home doesn’t bring you much joy, perhaps it’s time to seriously start considering a renovation, a clear out, or even a relocation.

Create actionable stepping stones that’ll ensure you achieve your goals, too. So, if you want to create a wider social circle, look into local classes, plan events that welcome plus-ones, or join a book club.

5. Let Go of What Doesn’t Serve You

If you uncover anything that isn’t really working for you, it might be time to let it go. This can be difficult, but it’s crucial you’re honest with yourself if you want to see real change.

If you’ve been trying for some time to make a job, a relationship, or a hobby work, and it’s just causing you pain, it may be that it no longer has a place in your life. However, if you find the stress worth it, or the pros outweigh the cons, look instead at how you can reduce the negative impact it’s been having on you.

A life audit isn’t a magic wand – it can’t fix your problems or give you the perfect life, but it can provide clarity about what direction to take if you’re feeling confused or simply in need of a change.

What's Next?

When you’re constantly on the go, and feel busy and stressed all the time, it can be easy to lose sight of the things that really matter. The Wheel of Life is a great tool you can use as part of your life audit.

It'll help you see what areas of your life you might want to direct more energy toward, and which areas you could perhaps spend less time on. This can allow you to refocus and reprioritize your efforts on the things that mean the most to you and give you the most satisfaction.

Download our Wheel of Life worksheet or watch our video now to start your audit!

Tip of the Week

Reframe Your Resolutions and Goals

By Lucy Bishop, Mind Tools Senior Editor

I’m definitely a New Year’s scrooge.

It’s January, the skies are gray, Christmas (my favorite time of year) is done, I’m broke, and I’m being told by the world that I should be making some New Year’s

Resolutions. Sigh.

Even the words “New Year Resolution” make me cringe. But that’s just my scrooge talking and he needs to take a break right now because this is Tip of the Week, not Moan of the Week!

After all, setting personal goals and achieving them can make you feel pretty good and may even be life altering.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given about making a resolution or goal, is to focus on what you want to do, rather than what you want to avoid. And resisting the pressure to make it some massive, overwhelming thing... instead making it something small and achievable.

Last year, to my surprise, I actually committed to and achieved a goal. Essentially, I wanted to be more physically fit and active.

I’m pretty hopeless at most sports. But there is one I’ve enjoyed since I was young, and that’s swimming.

Self-consciousness about having to wear a bathing suit in public meant I’d made my excuses for avoiding returning to the pool for far too long. So, I promised myself I’d get over those hang-ups and try and go at least twice a week.

And, you know what, I’m happy to say it’s now part of my routine and I absolutely love it.

Not only has it improved my physical fitness (I’ve noticed to my delight that I’m getting slightly quicker and stronger each week) but it’s also improved my mental health, helping me to unwind, relax and forget my cares, even if just for a little while.

So, don’t listen to that inner New Year’s scrooge. Think about what you want to achieve this year, start small and focus on what really matters to you. You never know, you might even rediscover something you love!

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News Roundup

This Week's Global Workplace Insights

Zoomers to Overtake Boomers in the Workplace in 2024

According to Glassdoor’s 2024 Workplace Trends report, Gen Z are set to overtake Baby Boomers in the workforce in the first few months of 2024.

Boomers were the largest generation in full-time work from the late 1970s until late 2011, before Gen X became the dominant generational workforce between 2012 to 2018. Since then, it’s been all about the Millennials, who will continue to outnumber other generational groups until the early 2040s.

Nonetheless, with an increasing number of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, and a rising number of Gen Zers gaining traction in their careers, companies will need to do more to attract, retain and support younger employees.

For Gen Z, who have grown up in a turbulent time of political and financial uncertainty, not to mention the pandemic and significant technological shifts, this might include more transparent career progression opportunities, greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and the ability to be more empowered at work.

Will Generative A.I. Live Up to the Hype?

Tired of hearing about how A.I. is going to steal your job? Bored of #AI trending on LinkedIn?

Well, the end may be in sight. A “cold shower” is forecast for A.I. in 2024, with the hype around the technology likely to plummet, as the reality of the “cost, risk and complexity” of developing A.I.-based products sets in.

According to CCS Insight, the excitement around A.I. that defined 2023 ignored several obstacles that will, in reality, slow progress. These include the cost of deployment, future regulation, and the social and commercial risks involved.

Generative A.I. tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude, rely on huge amounts of computing power to run their complex mathematical models, which means that the cost to organizations (and arguably to the planet) of running and sustaining them is immense.

Several regions and countries are also expected to introduce prohibitive legislation. The European Union’s A.I. Act, for example, will ban what it deems “unacceptable risks,” such as social scoring based on behavior and socio-economic status of users. China, meanwhile, has ruled that A.I. algorithms must be reviewed in advance by the state.

In contrast, the U.S. is expected to take a decentralized, state-based approach, that will aim to promote development of the technology, though with an emphasis on data security.

If you’re interested in how you and your team can respond to both demographic changes and digital transformation, download Mind Tools’ own recently published Insights report on the Megatrends Reshaping the Future.

See you next week for more member-exclusive content and insight from the Mind Tools team!