Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. So what does it mean to make a given you the best year of your life? And I think it's kind of three things. Firstly, it's that we are making progress towards the things that truly matter to us. Secondly, that our life is broadly in balance. So we're not screwing up one area of our life for the sake of another. And thirdly, that we are while working towards the things that matter to us, we are managing to enjoy ourselves and kind of enjoying every day when it's own merit, rather than purely seeing it as a means to an end.
And so in this video, I wanna go over three of my favorite methods. These are really simple methods. You can apply them whenever, whether it's at the start of the year or the middle of the year, or the end of the year, like literally whenever. And it will help you move more towards making sure that this coming year is the actual best year of your life in terms of meaningfulness and balance and enjoyability as well.
All right, so method number one is a really simple reflection exercise called the wheel of life. And the idea here is that we wanna split up life into a bunch of different components. And then we rate our satisfaction with those different areas of life. And so if you wanna do this exercise, you can do it on a piece of paper or you can do it on your phone. I think a piece of paper is nice. Start by drawing a little circle, that is your wheel. And then you wanna split it up into three segments. And those three segments are for your work, for your health and for your relationships. So now you have a wheel with three thirds. Now you wanna split up each of the thirds into three segments each. So at this point, you've got to wheel with nine segments. If you don't wanna do it on paper, you don't have to do it on paper. You can just literally write down these different categories that I'm about to give you.
And so those categories are within health. We have three things and that is body, mind and soul, or you can call it physical health, mental health, spiritual health. I kind of like body, mind and soul because it sounds more cute. Under relationships, we've got romance, family and friends. And then under work, we have mission, money and growth. And you can call mission in your career or job, but whatever you wanna call it, but that's kind of the main thing that you were doing for work.
Okay, so at this point, we've split up life into these nine different components. And the job now is that we wanna rate on a scale from zero to 10, how aligned we feel in each of these different areas of our life. And by aligned, I mean, my actions into here and now are consistent with where I think I would like to be. You can sort of think of this as how satisfied am I with this area of life? I prefer to think of it as alignment rather than satisfaction because like, I don't know, you might be a three out of 10 in terms of satisfaction with money because you're not yet a millionaire in passive income or whatever the thing might be. But you might be a 10 out of 10 in alignment because you are taking the actions necessary to get to where you want to be.
And so with this little diagram on screen, I would encourage you to pause the video now, genuinely please pause the video and just think about what would your rating out of 10 be for each of these different areas of life. And I guarantee that if you just pause this video and think about it, you will come up with some interesting insights into your life. And this is genuinely a good use of your time while you're watching YouTube right now. Just pause the video and really think about this.
Now these are the ratings that I gave myself when I did this exercise a few days ago. And the cool thing is that if you were doing this on pen and paper, then you can shade in the little wheel of life based on what your numbers are. So if you got a 10 out of 10, you would fully shade in that particular segment of the wheel. If you got a five, you would half shade it and you get the idea and you end up with this sort of FIFA-esque radar chart of like these different aspects of your life, which I think is pretty cool.
Now once you've done that, we are gonna add one final category which I don't put as part of the wheel. I sort of put it off to the side or underneath the wheel if I'm doing it on pen and paper. And that is the category for joy. How aligned do you feel with your actions in the here and now compared to where you wanna be in terms of the amount of joy you are experiencing in your life? And for me right now, that is probably a six out of 10.
Now this is great because the whole point is to help make this next year the best year of our life. And so in theory, if we were able to get to a point where we were let's say 10 out of 10 across all these different areas, that would mean that we are doing the things that are most meaningful to us and actually making progress towards them and we're also in balance with all the different areas of our life because broadly these 10 roughly cover pretty much every area of life. And hopefully we are also enjoying the journey along the way especially if we have a 10 out of 10 on the joy front too. So this is pretty cool, right? It means we have now created a clear sense of where we are right now and then we can get a sense of where we would like to be in terms of where we would like these numbers to go and whenever you have a sense of where you are now and where you want to be, that is what creates what we call goals and part of making this year the best year of your life is to be able to then make progress towards those goals.
And this is already a really good start because a lot of people want to be more productive but they don't even take an inventory of their life because they just think productivity is being just about work or just about hustle or grind or whatever. But actually, at least the way I think about it, productivity is using our time in a way that's intentional and effective and enjoyable. That is kind of the message of my book, feel the productivity.
At this point, it is worth highlighting or underlining or circling or whatever in each of these different areas in work, in health and relationships. What is the one that really stands out to you as needing some amount of work? So for example, for me in the relationships column, I've given my friends category a four out of 10 because it just doesn't seem my friends very often. And so that's one that clearly for me needs some work and so I'd be circling that. Within health, I've given my soul category a four out of 10 but I mean, I'm not overly concerned about that. I am concerned about the body slash physical health being just a five out of 10. So I'm going to circle that because that's something I want to actively work on. And then on the work front, I'm pretty blessed to be a nine out of 10 on mission and money but I'm only a seven out of 10 for growth. And so I want to circle that one because I feel like I could do with some more growth in my life.
But once you know how to do the wheel of life, you can actually just do this whenever you feel like your life is somewhat misaligned or you're not really sure where you're going or you feel a bit burnt out or you feel a bit stressed. It literally takes 30 seconds to just bring up these different nine to 10 categories and to just rate yourself out of 10 on each one. And then it's not to beat yourself up. You're not like, oh my God, I'm flagellating myself because I only gave myself a three out of 10. This is a pure solid inventory of where you are in these different areas of life. And then the great news is you can then start taking actions towards the remedy and certain of these areas.
Now, if you've been wondering why my money component on this wheel of life is a nine out of 10, that is because A, I've been running that business over seven years now and B, I have been investing my money throughout that time. And if you're interested in investing your money then you might like to check out trading two on two who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Trading two on two is a fantastic app that lets you invest in stocks and shares and funds in a very easy and commission-free fashion. And they've got a bunch of features which are super helpful which is why I personally use trading two on two to manage a portion of my portfolio.
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So that now brings us on to method number two. And that is what I call the 12 month celebration. And this is basically my preferred method for goal setting. So setting goals is an important part of life. There's a bunch of studies that show that people who set goals perform better and are more productive and feel happier with life than people who don't. There are also a bunch of studies that show that people who write their goals down are more likely to achieve them than people who either have the goals and don't write them down or don't have the goals at all. And so the 12 month celebration is just a very simple way of approaching goal setting and the exercise is simple. In each of the salient areas of your life, ask yourself, what would I like to be celebrating 12 months from now? And really imagine this, like imagine you are sitting down having dinner with a friend of yours, you guys are mutually kind of holding each other accountable and helping each other out. And you're celebrating together, you're really celebrating how much progress you've made in each of these different areas of your life. Now you can start with the three areas that you circled as being the most salient, or you can do it as I would recommend for all 10 different areas of your life. Especially if you're doing this like at the start of the year as part of an annual planning thing, you're asking yourself 12 months from now in each of these different areas, what would I like to be celebrating?
So for example, for me in the physical health category, because I've realized I've only rated it at five out of 10, I'm imagining I'm having dinner with let's say my friend, Godwin, who's pretty jacked, and I'm celebrating how much progress I've made in the last 12 months at my physical health.
What is like genuinely what is the thing that I would love to be celebrating 12 months from now? And then I'll come up with a few different candidate celebration options, like a few different options for goals. So I'd love to be celebrating having packed on loads of muscle, I'd love to be celebrating getting more lean, I'd love to be celebrating, having consistently worked out, let's say three times a week for the last 12 months, I'd love to be celebrating becoming more flexible and mobile, I'd love to be celebrating having played sports once or twice a week every week for the last 12 months. So these are all different options, but celebrating all of these is probably a bit much.
And so for each of these different categories, once you've thought about like, what would I love to be celebrating, what I'd encourage you to do is to really boil it down to, okay, cool, I would like to be celebrating all these five, 10 different things, but if I had to boil it down to just one thing, and I could only celebrate one thing, what would that one thing be? Because generally having a single goal to work towards helps the brain focus, it helps the entire kind of physiology, you know, habits, everything, just move in that one direction. Whereas if I was trying to build more muscle and also get lean and also play sports and also be more flexible, it's like there's a lot of, it becomes very overwhelming and very complicated very quickly. And I'm all about simplicity here.
So starting with what is the one goal? What is the one thing you would like to be celebrating? And so for me in the physical health front, I realized that the one thing I would love to be celebrating is to reduce my, reduce the amount of, my visceral abdominal fat that I have, done a couple of DEXAS cans recently, I found that I've got quite a lot of fat around the belly, thanks to my poor genetics and poor diet. And visceral adipose tissue is the thing that correlates with all these negative health outcomes, like cardiovascular disease and stroke and all the bad stuff. And so if I can get that number down, if I can reduce the amount of fat in my belly, thanks to my poor diet and my poor genetics, then that would be a great thing worth celebrating. And then all the other stuff like getting more muscle and becoming more mobile and playing sports, all of that kind of stuff is the cherry on top, it's the bonus.
And so you can do this 12 month celebration thing with the different areas of your life and that then creates a goals. Now, a couple of extra points when it comes to the 12 month celebration. One line that I really like adding to the end of any goal that I set, it's actually a trick I got from my friend, Diki Booksh, who is a fellow internet entrepreneur. And that is, whenever you set a goal, just add a few words to the end of that goal, which is while enjoying every step along the way.
So if we use this health example again, my 12 month celebration is to reduce my visceral adipose tissues to I.E. become more lean, but I would add the phrase while enjoying every step along the way. And that means that instead of just thinking of it as this goal that I'm fixated on, that I'm gonna kind of grind to get towards, it just helps my mind think in a little bit more of a light feel good productivity kind of way, a little bit more of an adventurous way of like, how do I get lean, but while also enjoying every step along the way.
And then tip number two for the 12 month celebration is please write this down somewhere. So I have a Google Doc that I use with my CEO coach, his name's Eric and we look at the Google Doc every quarter and we've written down what are my goals for each of the different areas of my life. And then every quarter, every three months, we'll figure out, okay, cool, for each of these different areas, what can we make tangible progress on in the next 90 days? And this is super helpful because if you think about these goals and you make them in your mind, but you don't write them down and then you don't look at that document ever again, then it just means you're gonna forget what goals you set at the start of the year. And this is a big part of why people struggle with New Year's resolutions. Because they set all these goals, they have all these like great intentions, but then they don't have any sort of system for reviewing the goals, reflecting on it, measuring their action and measuring their traction towards that particular goal.
And so if you're doing this exercise and I really recommend you do, if you do care about making this year that I invest you over your life, write the goal down somewhere, put it in a Google Doc, book market, put it on your Chrome bookmark bar, whatever the thing might be, just make it super easy to remind yourself about what your goals are. And this is why things like weekly reviews and monthly reviews and quarterly reviews, all this sort of stuff like reviewing our life is such a big part of anyone's productivity system, at least if they know anything about productivity.
And then the final tip I would recommend for the 12-month celebration is a bit of an optional extra, but this is quite helpful. When you've decided what you'd like to be celebrating 12 months from now with each of these different areas, ask yourself, why? Why is that particular thing important to you? And it's useful to have the why also in that document where you have written down your goals, because again, you can just remind yourself about why this thing was important to you. And so for me, the why behind this visceral adipose thing is, and this is what I've written down in my document, because visceral adipose tissue is the major thing that's going to lead to me dying early of cardiovascular and cerebral vascular disease. It's a significant priority to get that number down and to keep it down. Building more muscle is mostly a vanity thing, but reducing my abdominal fat is genuinely a helpful thing. So I've written down for myself exactly why that particular goal is important to me. And that's not to say you can't change these goals later in the year, but at least if you haven't written down and you have a clear why behind it, it means that you're more likely to stay on that path that you decided for yourself was going to be important to you.
By the way, all of this reflection and planning and stuff can be a little bit heavy if you're doing it on your own. So you don't have to do it on your own, because I'm in fact hosting a completely free live online workshop on the 6th of January, 2024. And that is available exclusively for the very kind of people who have pre-ordered a copy of my upcoming book, Feel the Productivity. So if you order a copy of the book before the 30th of December, 2023, and you send us your receipt, then you will get completely free access to this workshop on January the 6th, where I'll be taking you through these and a bunch of other exercises that I found super helpful that are very evidence-based, that will help you reflect on what 2023 was like and help you set tangible goals and plans for 2024, so that hopefully we can help make 2024 the best year of your life. So there's going to be more details down in the video description. If you are interested in attending this completely free live online event exclusively for the lovely people who have very kindly pre-ordered a copy of my book.
And then we come to method number three, and this is where the rubber meets the road, like with the reflection and goal setting and stuff, we have kind of charted a course for where we want to go, and now we need a system to ensure that we actually make the time and the space to get there.
And now there's loads of different productivity systems for this, I have a whole course that's coming out soon that's going to be about my Feel the Productivity system, you can read about strategies in the books well, but one really needle-moving strategy I want to share in this video is something that's called the ideal week method. And this has been one of the most game-changing time management techniques I've ever used. And basically the idea is that you open up a blank Google calendar and you call it your ideal week calendar, and you start off by blocking off the absolute essentials in your life, in terms of like when do you want to wake up? So for example, let's say every day I want to make up at 7 a.m., I would put that into a block in the calendar. Let's say I want to sleep, but 10 p.m., I'd put that into a block in the calendar. I'd be putting all these different blocks into my calendar, and then that shows me how much time do I have left to play with.
So those goals that we've just set in terms of the 12-month celebration in terms of these different areas of our life.
因此,我们刚刚为我们生活的不同方面设定的12个月庆祝的目标。
Our job when doing the ideal week is we want to try and find time, or not try it, we want to find time in our calendar every week to actually make time and to take action on these specific things.
So let's say in the friends category, I wanted to see my friends more often. My 12-month celebration might be that I'm celebrating the fact that I saw my friends for a group dinner at least once a week. In my ideal week calendar, I therefore need to have a block at least once a week for a group dinner with friends. And that's the point of the ideal week. It's like your ideal ordinary week. It's, you know, if things are going according to plan, roughly where are you spending your time and what are you blocking out time to do.
Similarly on the health front, my 12-month celebration is losing, is becoming more lean. And that means I need to have half an hour of day blocked into my eye a week for exercise every morning or every evening or whatever the thing might be.
And if you realize that you don't actually have time for a particular thing, because you're busy with other areas of your life, that's totally okay, but that means you can change your goal. You can change the 12-month celebration to reflect the time that you actually have.
One of the other big things that derails people is trying to be too perfectionistic and trying to do too much, trying to say, hey, you know, I want to set this goal and this goal and this goal and this goal. And then you look at your calendar and you realize that you actually just physically don't have the time because you have a job or two or you have kids to look after or you have to commute to school or whatever the thing might be.
The thing I love about the ideal week method is that it forces us to get clarity on what is actually important to us, what is the time that we have for the things that we have to do and then what's the time that we can use on the things that we actually want to do. And mostly you'll probably realize that this is less time than you thought you had, which is great because it means you can start doing fewer things and you can cross some things off your 12 month celebration list. Maybe it's not a goal you want to work on for this year. That's totally okay. Maybe you can work on it next year instead or when you have a little bit more time freed up in your life.
Now, if you enjoyed this video and you want to take a deeper dive into this stuff, then you're going to absolutely love my live free online workshop, which is being hosted on January 6th, 2024 and that's going to be a few hours where I take you through these exercise live over Zoom calls will actually do the exercises and I'll elaborate on them a little bit more so that we can set you up for 2024 to be the best year of your life.
And that is exclusively available for the very nice people who have pre-ordered my book. So you can pre-order my book with the link down below and then you can send us your receipt and we'll make sure you go to ticket to the event.
And if you enjoyed this video and you want to know more about my specific methods for time management, you're going to love this video, which is the Trident Method for time management. It includes a few more details about the ideal week, along with my time management process for the whole year and also day to day.