Periodically evaluate your life design journey
Periodic evaluation can make the difference between achieving your design goals or not.
Periodically evaluating your life design journey involves a structured and reflective process. This process takes relatively little time and can make the difference between achieving your design goals or not. Among other things, it helps you assess progress, stay aligned with your life purpose and personal values, make necessary adjustments, and maintain a healthy balance across your life areas.
Why evaluate?
Periodically evaluating your life design journey is crucial for several reasons.
👉 Assess progress
Regular evaluations can help you determine how far you've come since you started your life design journey. This assessment will help you determine if you are on the right track or if adjustments are needed.
👉 Align with life purpose and personal values
Life purpose and personal values can evolve over time. What was important to you five years ago may not have the same relevance today. Evaluating your life design journey ensures that your actions and decisions align with your current life purpose and personal values.
👉 Maintain balance
Life design isn't just about achieving professional or financial success; it's also about finding balance in various life areas, such as physical and emotional health, work, relationships and personal growth. Evaluations help you assess whether you're maintaining a healthy balance across these life areas.
👉 Adapt to change
Life is unpredictable and sometimes unexpected challenges or opportunities arise. Life circumstances change over time, for example due to career changes, family dynamics and health fluctuations. Regular evaluations can help you assess whether you are on the right life path and help you make the necessary course corrections to stay on track toward your desired destination.
👉 Eliminate unwanted habits
Regular evaluations can help you identify and eliminate unhelpful habits. It's an opportunity to break free from routines that are holding back your progress and replace them with more productive routines so you can focus your time and energy on more meaningful pursuits.
👉 Reflect on mistakes
Mistakes provide valuable learning opportunities. Examining your mistakes can help you determine what went wrong and why. This knowledge will help you make better choices in the future and prevent you from making the same mistakes.
👉 Set priorities
Life often offers you countless choices and opportunities. Regular evaluations help you prioritise your commitments and activities so you can focus your time and energy on what really matters to you.
👉 Set new design goals
When you achieve your existing design goals, you may want to set new goals. Periodic evaluation provides the opportunity to define new design goals and chart a path toward them.
👉 Improved well-being
Evaluating your life design journey can lead to improved well-being. When you have a clear sense of direction and purpose, you are likely to experience more happiness, satisfaction, and fulfilment in your life.
👉 Take responsibility
Regular evaluation can help you hold yourself accountable for your actions and decisions. It's a way to take responsibility for your life and the choices you make. Assessments can help you identify areas where you have been procrastinating, which can prompt you to improve your effort and discipline.
👉 Prevent regret
Evaluating your life design journey can help prevent future regrets. By periodically assessing your choices and actions, you can make adjustments before it's too late to achieve your desired outcomes or pursue missed opportunities.
How to evaluate?
You can evaluate your life design journey by taking the following steps.
⚒️ Determine milestones
Determine how often you want to conduct evaluations. Depending on your situation and preferences, you can combine a monthly evaluation with a more general six-monthly or annual evaluation. Choose specific dates and mark these milestones on your calendar for the coming year.
⚒️ Evaluate monthly
At the end of each month, answer for yourself questions like the ones below. These questions serve as a framework for your self-reflection and evaluation process. Record the results of these monthly evaluations. This allows you to track your progress and see how your life design journey evolves.
🤔 Assess progress: Have I gotten closer to my design goal in the past month? Have I achieved significant milestones? Am I satisfied with my progress? Am I using my time effectively and efficiently to work on my goals? What obstacles and challenges are holding me back? What techniques should I start using to increase my chances of success?
🤔 Life purpose and personal values: Are my actions and choices in line with my personal values and what I find important to do (life purpose)? Have I become more like the kind of person I want to be?
🤔 Balance: Do I maintain a healthy balance between life areas such as physical health, emotional health, work and relationships? What actions can I take to restore the balance between my life areas?
🤔 Adapt to change: How well have I adapted to unexpected changes or circumstances? What strategies can I use to better deal with changes in the future? Is my design goal or life path still relevant and meaningful to me?
🤔 Eliminate unwanted habits: Are there any time-wasting habits or distractions I need to address?
🤔 Reflect on mistakes: What mistakes have I encountered and what have I learned from them? How can I apply these lessons to avoid similar mistakes in the future?
🤔 Prioritise: Based on this evaluation, what are my priorities for the next month? What are the next steps and action items?
Celebrate your achievements and appreciate your progress. Be kind to yourself if the evaluation results disappoint you, just do better next month. If necessary, reduce the impact of unhelpful thoughts and feelings (see the References section for links to details).
⚒️ Evaluate annually
Annually (or six-monthly if you prefer), evaluate the complete state of affairs in your life. If necessary, you can do this full evaluation earlier than planned, for example if you feel that your life is not going the way you want at all.
1️⃣ Prepare the evaluation
👉 Gather the most recent versions of the life design documents you created during your journey (life purpose, list of personal values, life area tables, and so on). Make a copy of these documents before updating them in this evaluation.
👉 Gather relevant information related to your life design journey. For example, the results of your monthly evaluations, health or financial data and the most significant changes since the last annual evaluation.
👉 Reach out to friends, mentors, or advisors for their input and perspective.
2️⃣ Personal values
Have any of your personal values changed since the last annual evaluation?
If so, update your list of personal values, perhaps after going through the personal values determination process again.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-figure-out-your-personal-values
3️⃣ Life purpose
Have some parts of your life purpose changed since the last annual evaluation?
If so, formulate your new life purpose, perhaps after going through the life purpose determination process again.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-your-life
4️⃣ Update where you are now
Your life circumstances have almost certainly changed since the last annual evaluation, so update how things are going now for your life areas (physical health, emotional health, work, relationships and possibly the life area of your own choice). Update the detailed life area tables and rate the life areas with a score from 1 to 10. How do your scores differ from last time?
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/determine-where-you-are-now
5️⃣ Update where you want to go (if necessary)
Is your current design goal still in line with your life purpose, personal values and current life circumstances (where you are now)?
If not, formulate and record a new design goal by going through the process of determining where you want to go.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/determine-where-you-want-to-go
This completes the annual evaluation. Based on the outcome, you continue to build your current life path, or you determine a new life path to where you want to go, test the ideas of the chosen path, and build this path.
⚒️⚒️⚒️
Remember that life design is a process, not a result. Enjoy the journey.
References
Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
How to reduce the impact of unhelpful thoughts, A3 Life Design, by Adrie Kuil, https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-reduce-the-impact-of-unhelpful-thoughts
How to reduce the impact of unpleasant feelings, A3 Life Design, by Adrie Kuil, https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-reduce-the-impact-of-unpleasant-feelings
My blog posts about life design are available at this link:
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/category/Life+Design
