Give yourself a life audit
How to figure out where you are, where you’re going, and what needs to change to organize your life
We’ve all been there. One minute you feel like you’ve got everything together, and the next minute somehow everything seems so jumbled up in your life; you feel misaligned; it feels like you don’t have time to do anything, and life just becomes overwhelming.
This has happened to me more than a few times, and each time the realization of the fact that my life felt so overwhelming made me feel even more overwhelmed. So just know that you’re not the only one, and there is a way to re-organize and realign yourself so that everything looks so much more clear to you.
I remember the first time I felt like I was losing grip of things when it came to my career. Thankfully, I was already married, so I had the support of my husband, and he probably doesn’t know it yet, but he is the person who got me started on doing a life audit when things got tough. He is the most organized person I have ever known in my life and sees things so differently from me, and I guess this is also what makes us work together so well.
I still remember the first time I lost grip of things when it came to my career. My husband and I were discussing a new project, which meant new responsibilities and even more things to do when it came to work. I remember almost having a breakdown, telling him I couldn’t handle any more responsibility and that I just didn’t have the time for it. I remember going on and on about how I was barely managing my current workload. He saw how much it was upsetting me, so he said that we should sit down and talk through what all of my responsibilities are when it comes to my side of work. He asked me to make a list of everything I do so that we could later sit down, go through it, and try and work out a better method and approach.
I remember saying to him that you’ll have to give me at least a week to make a list every day because every day is just so different for me and consists of so many different things that I need to do. Now, when I think back on it, I can tell I was overcomplicating things in my own mind and almost subconsciously trying to make it difficult for him to help me with this problem. I think I felt so overwhelmed that it just felt impossible for anyone to have a solution for this problem of mine.
Needless to say, I started this list on a Monday, and up until the following Monday, my list could’ve been published as a book for the longest list ever made. Because of how much I was overcomplicating things in my own mind, even with just creating a list, I was breaking down each task into a bundle of smaller tasks. I handed this list over to my husband, and I remember his response being, ‘Only you could have turned a list into an essay!'
He then continued to explain how to organize things, went through the entire list with me, and helped me to look at things very differently and organize things very differently. It was from that point on that anytime I felt like work or life was getting on top of me, I approached things in the way that he had taught me, and I also decided to customize his advice so that it worked for me every time I felt overwhelmed.
Firstly, I want you to know that there’s no harm in getting a little help from someone. Sometimes it’s difficult to ask for help, and sometimes it can be difficult to listen to advice. You don’t always have to have all of the answers, and it’s important to know that you can’t do everything. It’s OK to get a helping hand so that you can get back on track and be even better than before.
So let’s talk about how to give yourself a life audit. If this is the first time you are trying to organize things yourself, then there are a couple of things that will help you get started:
Post-it notes
Pen
A wall or a door to use as your workspace
I know that there are much easier ways to do this digitally, but trust me on this. The fact that this is an analog system will really keep it fresh in your mind, and it’s immediately visible to you; you’re not looking at a small screen on your phone or a laptop trying to organize so many different thoughts and tasks in a visually small space. Once you’ve gotten the hang of this system, you can very easily shift it all over to a digital board such as Air Table or Trello; however, I would highly recommend starting with an analog system.
You’re going to start writing different goals on your post-it notes; that’s one goal per post-it note. Include everything from goals to hopes, even if they feel unachievable to you. You can then move on to writing down the responsibilities that you have on each post-it note. It’s up to you what topic you decide to include in this life audit. You can include everything from finance responsibilities to career responsibilities to relationship responsibilities, or you can just stick to the categories that you personally feel overwhelmed by.
Once you’ve finished writing all of your goals, hopes, and anything else you decided to add, you’re going to now categorize these topics on your wall. For example, career post-it notes will be bundled together on one side; relationship post-it notes will be on a different side. You should slowly start to see a theme taking place, and visually, this will make so many things clearer to you. There’s something about visually seeing your thoughts on paper that immediately resonates differently.
Now I want you to have a separate section of the wall dedicated to ‘to do’. From all of the post-it note categories you’ve created on your wall, I want you to find all of the notes that you have not yet completed, even if you’ve already started on some of them but not yet finished. Grab them and move them to the to-do section. Every time you complete a task or goal that is on a post-it note, I want you to move it to the associated category. Sometimes your to-do category will empty out, and sometimes it will look pretty full, but ultimately, your goal is to get those things done so that you can move onto your next goal.
Now take a step back and look at all of your thoughts laid out on the wall. By looking at this, you can kind of understand why and how easy it is to become overwhelmed by your thoughts and responsibilities. By visually seeing all of your responsibilities, goals, and hopes written on these post-it notes and clearly categorized, it should make things much clearer for you.
Ultimately, your wall of post-it notes should help you reflect on everything you see and also motivate you to take action for real change. It should also give you a clearer idea of how to do it. If you really want to delve deeper, you can adjust the system by giving yourself a score on each poster note. What I mean by this is to rate how happy you are with each of the post-it notes: 1 being unhappy and 5 being very satisfied. For example, if one of your post-it notes says finance and you have rated it as a 1, think about why you are so unhappy with that and what needs to change in order to bring that score up. This may mean adding new tasks to the category.
There are so many different ways of adjusting the system so that it suits you. So however you decide to customize it for yourself the same way that I did, I hope it helps you to re-organize and realign yourself.
I have this on my little planner/diary.. Perhaps it's not the same in a way because I think I should do this on a bigger scale, as you said on a wall or behind my bdrm door, so I can visibly see this. I feel like I need to have my analog system in bold colors that Visual Display will grab my undivided attention and fulfill my responsibilities, 'to dos', hopes and plans and not deter or forget which happens sometimes often 😅 due to life in general. I've done this for my kids too and it's great and works well with them over the years. As they're coming to senior year of schooling they customise it to fit their life style at home, schooling and sports. I see them keeping it up and real and drives me to do the same everyday and vice versa.
Hi Nina -
Thank you so much for the useful information.