fun house

how i audit my life

Step 1: general focus

before i get into the different areas of my life i like to just take a wholistic focus on what I've been up to. I try to look through my past to do lists, see my calendar of events I've attended and look relevant diary posts. What has been capturing my attention? What patterns do I see? Once I'm able to really define the past two months or so I answer the following questions:

• What is my dominant emotion lately?
• What has been on my mind a lot lately? Why do I think about it so much?
• What has made me happiest recently?
• What is causing me the most stress?
• Are the changes I’ve already implemented serving me?
• What have I done that has made me proud?
• If you had 3 wishes, what would you wish for?

Step 2: Drill into my 12 areas

I've seen many different charts with different areas of life in a number of different categories, I've settled on 12 as a good number for me because then I can tie them to a zodiac sign and that makes me happy. With each life area I like to think about the last 5 things I've accomplished in there that I'm proud of and then rank on a scale 1-10 how satisfied I feel in that area. 1 would be "This area of my life is desolate - there is nothing good happening here and in fact it drains me" and 10 would be "I could die today and feel like I fulfilled every goal in this area of my life". This helps me figure out how productive I've been in the areas where I've put my energy into."

step 3: making plans

At this point in the audit I've got a good sense of what areas I've been neglecting and may even start thinking of new goals or projects I want to pursue. I try to limit to about 3 areas but this is an art not a science. To help me figure out my next goals I ask myself the following:

What are my priorities in terms of shoulds and wants?

Are there looming threats or opportunities in the next 2 months to take advantage of?

step 4: troubleshooting

oh boy I've got a list of goals now that I want to accomplish! I'm usually very optimistic and hopeful at this point - unaware that in 2 weeks time I will be completely unwilling to do the work to make these things happen. Knowing this - I use this step as a way to both keep accountable and compassionate. If you're neurospicy like me it's important to understand your natural urges to want to quit goals and work around them rather than just trying to muscle your way through it. I try to list out the problems I will likely run into (especially if I've tried to do a goal similar to this in the past and failed). I'll then think up some ideas on how to solve it and what tools I have in my disposal. For example

goal	problem	strategies	tools
learn piano	no motivation, no time	schedule micro practice sessions, follow 5 piano players on social	tiktok, calendar, my planner, habbit tracker
Volunteer for something	i have no idea what i want to do and for who	research, ask friends, think about issues that matter to me	journal, news articles, community boards

step 5: follow up

I'm going to forget about this - i know my brain. So I plan to regularly look back at this audit and check in on my lists. I normally update the goals with a 5th column for "progress" where i put how far I've gotten in the goal. At this point I'll usually have run into new problems so I'll refresh my list of problems and think of new solutions. And it's very often that my problem is "i dont care" or "i dont want to" - in which case I try to honestly think about if this was a spur of the moment goal or if it's something I want despite not wanting to do the work. If it's the latter I may think up incentives to finish the goal. Just because I dont want to do something doesn't mean I dont want the outcome. Like fuck I hate mopping my floors but it feels great once they're clean!