The Twelve Life Areas

Values & Purpose

Your deeper, underlying, fundamental values and wants. Your philosophy of life. Your sense of purpose, vision, and meaning.

  • Do I have a sense of purpose and direction in life?
  • What do I want out of life?
  • How do I want the world to be different?
  • What is my philosophy of life?
  • What are my fundamental values?
  • What do I truly value?

Contribution & Impact

How you give value to the world, make a difference, and have a positive impact.

  • How am I giving value to the world?
  • How much value?
  • How much money did I give away in the past year (assuming it made sense to do so)? Who did it go to? Did it have the most possible impact?
  • Am I taking responsibility for, and reducing, my environmental impact on the world?
  • Am I making a difference?
  • Am I contributing to important and worthy causes that I care about?
  • How much impact does my existence have (environmentally, socially, cognitively)?

Location & Tangibles

Your physical presence in the world. Where you are in the world. Your living situation. Your stuff. What you own and why. Your material sufficiency. Your mobility.

  • Do I have material sufficiency?
  • Where do I live? Where is my home?
  • Where in the world am I?
  • What is my living situation like?
  • Am I tied to one location? Am I readily mobile (if desired)?
  • How much stuff do I own? Do I have too many things?
  • Is my life cluttered?

Money & Finances

Your savings, investments, assets, and debt. How your money is organization and managed. Your inflows, budgets, and outflows.

  • Do I have savings? How much? Where are they?
  • Do I have an emergency fund? How much? Where is it?
  • What is the status of my assets and investments?
  • Do I know where my money goes?
  • Do I budget? What is my budget?
  • Am I aware of how I spend my money?
  • How do I want to be spending my money?
  • Are my finances organized?
  • Do I have any (unwanted) debt?

Career & Work

Your work, job, career, and business. Your position, title, role, and responsibilities. Your source of income.

  • How do I make my money?
  • What do I do? What is my position?
  • What is my role? Where do I work?
  • Am I so good they can't ignore me?
  • Does my career give me mastery, control, and purpose?
  • Am I engaged?
  • Am I well-positioned and networked within my industry?
  • How stressful is my career/work?

Health & Fitness

Your eating habits, diet, exercise habits, and activity levels. How resilient you are to sickness. Your overall energy level. Your sleeping patterns and quality. Your major health issues and susceptibilities.

  • What do I typically eat? What is my current diet?
  • Do I regularly eat fast food or make healthy home-cooked meals?
  • Am I generally tired or alert?
  • How often do I get sick?
  • Do you exercise? What form? How often?
  • How much do I sleep on average? Am I getting good quality sleep?
  • How much do I weigh?
  • What is my resting heart rate?
  • Are there any health risks that run in my family? Am I taking adequate steps to address these?

Education & Skill Development

Your learning, education, and mental development. Your talents and skills. Your skill development, practicing, and training.

  • What is my current education status?
  • What do I know?
  • Am I spending time learning new things and developing my mind?
  • What are my talents and skills?
  • How much have I read in the past year?
  • What talents and skills have I recently developed, or plan to develop?

Social Life & Relationships

The intimate relationship(s) you have or want to have. The quality of your relationships. Your home life and relationships with family members. Your friend circles and social experiences. Your club, organization, and community memberships.

  • How is my home life?
  • How is my relationship with the members of my immediate and extended family?
  • Am I a good friend?
  • How many core friends do I have?
  • How large are my social circles?
  • Am I cared for, loved, and valued by others?
  • Are my partner and I aware of each other’s needs and desires?
  • What clubs, organizations, and communities am I a member of?
  • Do I have influence and status in my social circles? In society?

Emotions & Well-Being

Your general feeling about life, optimism or pessimism, positivity or negativity. Your emotional intelligence. Your subjective well-being, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-compassion.

  • How do I feel about my life?
  • Am I enjoying life?
  • Am I generally optimistic or pessimistic?
  • Am I generally positive or negative?
  • Am I easily aware of my current emotional state?
  • Am I quick to notice how my emotions are influencing my thoughts, actions, and decisions?
  • Do I have a regular mindfulness practice?
  • Do I practice self-compassion?

Character & Identity

Your identity and model of yourself. Your strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices. Your intelligence, integrity, honesty, courage, compassion, honor, self-discipline, and so on.

  • What identity do I have?
  • Is my identity small? http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
  • What are my key strengths and weaknesses?
  • What are my greatest virtues and vices?
  • How do I rate my compassion, integrity, empathy, honor, self-discipline, self-awareness, responsibility, courage, focus, authenticity, confidence, persistence, effectiveness, etc.?

Productivity & Organization

Your memorized solutions, daily routine, schedule, effectiveness, organization, and productivity. Your setup, systems, processes, tools, and techniques.

  • What productivity systems and tools do I use?
  • Am I organized? What are my systems?
  • What are my routines and rituals?
  • Is there too much complexity in my life? Do I need to simplify?
  • Am I doing any deep work?
  • Am I busy due to a lack of priorities?
  • Do I have a good workspace environment and setup?

Adventure & Creativity

Your hobbies, pastimes, and things you do for fun and adventure. Your creativity and its expression.

  • Am I experiencing what I want to experience in life?
  • What fun things have I done lately? In general?
  • What creative things have I done lately? In general?
  • What are my hobbies? What do I do for fun?

Notes:

Folksonomies: productivity evaluation life purpose

Taxonomies:
/business and industrial (0.573768)
/society/crime/property crime/larceny (0.462368)
/health and fitness (0.429346)

Keywords:
life (0.936867 (positive:0.189100)), amp (0.934101 (positive:0.504314)), Life Areas Values (0.894705 (positive:0.384885)), living situation (0.867374 (neutral:0.000000)), material sufficiency (0.862243 (negative:-0.531156)), fundamental values (0.849952 (positive:0.534317)), social circles (0.829372 (neutral:0.000000)), major health issues (0.825425 (neutral:0.000000)), overall energy level (0.821055 (neutral:0.000000)), current education status (0.818541 (neutral:0.000000)), good quality sleep (0.817092 (positive:0.737274)), healthy home-cooked meals (0.817002 (positive:0.803406)), home life (0.815930 (positive:0.477977)), good workspace environment (0.813664 (positive:0.527361)), current emotional state (0.808878 (positive:0.767579)), skill development (0.807671 (positive:0.427011)), regular mindfulness practice (0.806899 (positive:0.472471)), world (0.766989 (positive:0.538097)), money (0.761939 (negative:-0.437999)), Social Life (0.752773 (neutral:0.000000)), possible impact (0.746091 (neutral:0.000000)), positive impact (0.744870 (positive:0.562844)), environmental impact (0.739866 (neutral:0.000000)), worthy causes (0.739416 (positive:0.822489)), emergency fund (0.732513 (negative:-0.411369)), physical presence (0.730789 (neutral:0.000000)), current diet (0.727022 (negative:-0.407964)), new things (0.725856 (neutral:0.000000)), creative things (0.725524 (positive:0.501468)), deep work (0.724377 (negative:-0.527743))

Entities:
heart rate:FieldTerminology (0.948305 (neutral:0.000000)), partner:JobTitle (0.923156 (neutral:0.000000)), fast food:FieldTerminology (0.922796 (positive:0.803406))

Concepts:
Virtue (0.973506): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Value (0.960454): dbpedia | freebase
Meaning of life (0.700608): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Life (0.683710): dbpedia | freebase
Emotion (0.669277): dbpedia | freebase

 8,760 hours
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Vermeer, Alex (December 2012), 8,760 hours, Retrieved on 2017-01-01
  • Source Material [alexvermeer.com]
  • Folksonomies: productivity