How to do a life audit
A life audit is a great way that helps you take a thorough look at your life and evaluate it. With routine work and mundane tasks, you may lose the bigger purpose of life. A life audit will help you get a reality check and take the right action. In this post, I am sharing how to do a life audit and use a life audit to improve life it to improve life.
I am by profession a quality auditor, and most times I find during the audit that deficiencies exist because they never surfaced or the person working didn’t realize or was aware of the issue. And I feel that is so true with life. We never realize that we are not taking action for the life we want or being intentional about life until we miss on achieving goals or face a consequence due to our ignorance. And that’s why doing a life audit fascinates me.
Let’s take a deep dive into How to do a life audit?
What is the meaning of a life audit?
A life audit is a process of reflecting on your current life and evaluating your current life situation This helps you find if you are living a meaningful and fulfilling life.
While doing a life audit you take a deep dive into your values, beliefs, and priorities to determine if they align with your actions and goals. This helps you prioritize what truly matters to you, identify areas of improvement, and make necessary changes to live a happier and more fulfilled life.
When to do a Life Audit?
Generally speaking, there is no right time to do a life audit. You can do it any time and how many times you need. Here are some suggestions on when to do a life audit.
- You can do a Life audit at the end of the year so that at the start of the year you have clear directions.
- You can do it mid-year or every 6 months.
- You can do a life audit when you are stuck in life and unclear about life goals.
- You should do a life audit when you are entering a new phase of your life or there is a significant change in your life such as a new job, moving city, moving in with someone, getting married, etc.
- I highly recommend doing a life audit at least once a year and even better if you can do it twice a year. I prefer to do a life audit at the end of the year and mid-year around June-July. Some suggest doing a life audit every month I don’t find it necessary. However, every month I like to do a monthly review, whereas a life audit is more in-depth.
P.S. You can read more about my monthly review here, How to do Monthly reflection quickly
Life Audit Process
Here are the Life Audit Process details, follow these steps to do a life audit.
Step 1: Define the purpose of the life audit
To do a life audit start with the purpose of life audit. There can be many reasons one would like to conduct a life audit, but your life audit is unique because it has your purpose. Being clear on the purpose will make the life audit process easier and more fruitful for you.
If you are doing a life audit because you feel overwhelmed you must focus more on work and tasks that stress you.
If you are doing a life audit because you want to be more intentional in life then you must focus more on values, belief.
If you are doing a life audit because you feel stuck in life and do not understand where you have to go then you must focus more on the purpose of life and personal growth.
So finding a clear purpose will make you do the life audit the right way and yield good results.
Step 2: Identify life audit categories
Once you have identified the purpose of the life audit. You should find categories of life that are directly related to the purpose. These categories will build the framework for the life audit and your life audit will be based on these.
Some of the common categories of life audits that you can select to make a life audit framework are below:
- Physical health
- Mental wellness
- Emotional health
- Relationships
- Career
- Finance
- Personal growth
- Home
- Creativity
- Freedom
- Independence
- Hobbies
- Values
- Belief
- Spirituality
These are some of the categories of life that can be considered for a life audit. You must select only those that fit your purpose, do not limit yourself only to the above categories. If you think there are other categories that are necessary to consider you can add those too.
Step 3: Use the Life audit wheel
You can also use a life audit wheel to do a life audit. The wheel of life is a tool that helps you assess different key areas of your life. It is divided into 8 parts and each part is a different dimension of life. And each concentric circle is used for evaluation to assess your life for that particular dimension of life. You can grade your life for each area on the life audit wheel on a scale of 1 to 10.
Following are the common areas of life covered in the Wheel of Life.
- Health
- Finance
- Career
- Relationship
- Personal growth
- Environment
- Spirituality
- Leisure
Step 4: Use life audit questions
Next, you need to reflect on your life for all the categories you have identified to perform the life audit. Once you start performing a life audit you will realize it’s quite difficult to inspect yourself and find where you truly stand. I mean there are so many parts of life to consider and defining categories in the previous steps will help you.
But thinking in depth about how you are doing in each area of life is not as easy as it may sound. So to make the process more simplified and fact-driven you should define some questions to understand your current state of life. These questions will be prompts to make you think in depth about your life.
So you should come up with a question for each category to go deep in your thoughts. For example, if you auditing your life for the category of personal growth, you should ask yourself questions like
- What are some habits that you should give up?
- Which new habits you would like to develop?
- What are the skills that you are struggling with?
- What new can you do to make yourself more confident?
These questions will serve as a checklist for auditing life and get you started with doing a life audit. You can refer to my post 100 Self reflection questions
Step 5: Evaluate your life
After defining questions for the life audit you must evaluate yourself using these questions. You need to be honest with yourself and give unfiltered answers to these questions.
You need to grade yourself for each of the categories identified to find the area of life that need improvements. You can define any grading system as you like but if you are following the wheel of life to perform the life audit you must give scores to yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 for different categories. Where 0 is unsatisfactory and 10 is very satisfied.
The best way to evaluate your life is to give deep thought to different self-reflection questions under each category and score where you stand on these on a scale of 1 to 10 and then average all of them to get the score for the category on the wheel of life
Step 6: Analyzing the Results
Once you have completed reflecting on your life and have evaluated it. It’s now time to make some sense of everything you have done in the life audit. You must analyze these results to get a real situation assessment of your life.
To analyze the results find the area that gets the least score. These should be your areas to focus on to make your life better. So the 3 areas that get the least score will turn out to be your 3 major areas of focus moving forward to make your life better.
If your purpose of life audit was to find answers to overwhelm in life, fixing these 3 areas will make your life less stressful.
You should also have a look at the score of individual questions that you have answered for the least score category and the questions that had the least score will be your starting point to take action to make yourself better.
For the areas that have a good score, you must look at those points or questions that got low scores, these are gaps that will help you improve your life.
Step 7: Review your achievements and failures
It is possible that you may have missed some area of your life for the life audit or there may be some aspect of that particular area of life that can be missed. Hence you should spend some time reviewing your achievements and failures.
Reviewing your failures and spending time to understand the reason for failure or things that you could have done to avoid the failure or get better is a valuable lesson to learn from the life audit.
Also, a life audit is not just about finding flaws and gaps in your life but also to discover this that are going well in life and feeling grateful for it. Spending some thought on your achievements will help you realize the strengths and skills that you are good at. It is not always necessary that you must only work on your weakness to improve your life but at times making use of your strengths to your benefit is also a good strategy for a successful life.
Step 8: Make a plan of action
Your life audit is incomplete if you do not have an action plan from all the key takeaways from the life audit. Make a plan of action to fill the gaps identified in your life from the life audit. Align them with your values, aspiration, and lifestyle. Identify areas of improvement and look out for a pattern or repetitive cause that is an obstacle to a fulfilled life. These can be your habits, surrounding, and lifestyle. Your plan of action should include a clear priority of things that will be given immediate attention and a strategy to gradually take care of other observations of the life audit.
Take the time to reflect on your life audit findings and craft a plan that works for you, keeping in mind flexibility, and adaptability. Define a structure to make an intentional and fulfilling life.
Step 9: Set Goals
Making an action plan will give you direction to move in life for betterment but to make sure you take action as per the plan you must set goals.
When defining goals carefully look at each item of your action plan and prioritize them. List out your goals in order you would want to achieve them as per your plan of action. At times you may wish to attend 2 goals in parallel.
With goals priority sorted out now is the time to define a timeline for each goal and set a measurable action to achievement of each goal.
For example if one of your goals is to work on personal development by building a new skill. Your goal can be to take an online course to learn the skill in the next 3 months. Or reading 3 books to learn the skill in 6 months. Or Reading 1 article each day on personal development.
Defining the goal, specific actions that must be completed to achieve the goal and a timeline ensures you have clarity and the right steps planned to meet the goals.
You can read my post on Goal setting and goal planning for more details on setting SMART goals, it also has a free printable to help you with goal planning.
Step 10:Make a vision board
Lastly, your life audit is incomplete until to identify what a fulfilling life looks like for you. Finding gaps and making a goal plan is one part but you need a visual reminder of your dream life and a source of motivation that drives you to achieve the goals.
The best way to do this is by making a vision board. It is a visual representation of your goals and dream life and is expressed with images, and quotes that bring the aesthetics together for your life. It is also a great way to manifest your dream life. Hence I would highly recommend making a vision board based on your life audit results and goals.
To make your own vision board read my post Steps to create Vision board that manifest your dream life, it has a free printable to get you started.
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Conclusion
These were all the details for doing a life audit. The steps shared in this post and the use of a wheel of life will help you perform the life audit quickly and effectively. Also, it is not enough to just do the life audit but to understand the results and make a plan of action to fill the gaps and work on opportunities to make your life more fulfilling.
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