Wheel of Life

The wheel of life is a one-page check of how satisfied you are with the main areas of your life. You rate each area from 1 to 10 and shade a slice of a circle to match, so the uneven spots show at a glance. It is a reflection exercise, not a test: the point is to choose the one area to work on next.

The tool above uses eight areas: health, sleep and energy, love life, friends and family, work or study, money, fun and rest, and growth and meaning. The wheel is usually credited to Paul J. Meyer, the founder of the Success Motivation Institute, who used it for goal setting. Coaches have changed the areas ever since, so there is no single official list. If something that matters to you is missing, such as faith or your home, rate it as part of the nearest area.

1. Rate each area by how satisfied you feel with it lately, not by how it would look to someone else. Every number has a word under it, and every area has a description of what a 1 and a 10 feel like, so your numbers mean the same thing next month. 2. Tap a slice of the wheel or a number. On a computer, keys 1 to 9 work, and 0 means 10. You can skip an area and come back to it. 3. Look at the shape before the numbers. Which slices are short? Which would you most like to be longer? 4. Pick one area to work on this month and up to three small actions for this week, from the list for that area or in your own words. 5. Save it. Between check-ins, the page opens with your plan and tick boxes. A month later, re-check: your new wheel is drawn over the old one as a dashed line, and the page lists which areas moved.

Prefer paper? Print the blank wheel of life template from the tool. It has rings from 1 to 10, one question per area and lines for your plan. Shade each slice from the center out, and next month draw the new wheel over it in another color.

The average gives a rough sense of the whole, but the shape tells you more. The tool calls a wheel with areas close together a smooth ride, and one with a wide gap between the strongest and weakest areas a bumpy one. A bumpy wheel is common and is not a verdict. It simply shows where your attention has gone.

The lowest area is not always the right one to work on. Pick the area that would make others easier if it moved up a point. Better sleep often lifts health, work and patience with the people around you. Some low scores are a season, not a problem: a new baby or a big deadline will squeeze fun and rest for a while, and that can be a choice you are fine with.

A 10 everywhere is not the goal. Most people live well with a few areas at 6 or 7. What matters is whether the low ones are the ones you can live with.

A month with eight goals usually ends with none. One area and a few small, specific actions is a plan you can keep on a bad week. Research on what psychologists call implementation intentions backs up the small, specific part. In a 1999 review, Peter Gollwitzer described how plans that tie an action to a situation ("after lunch on Monday, I will walk for ten minutes") help people act on goals. A 2006 meta-analysis38002-1) by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests and found a medium-to-large effect of such plans on reaching goals. That is why the tool asks you to add when and where.

A month is long enough to see whether an area moved, but short for a new habit. In a study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues (2010), 96 volunteers repeated one daily behavior in the same context. The time it took them to reach most of the automaticity they would reach ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single day did not undo progress. So if an action is not easy yet after a month, keep it, and judge it by whether it is getting easier.

A self-care wheel is a close cousin. Instead of life areas, it splits looking after yourself into kinds, such as body, mind, feelings, relationships and work, and lists ways to care for each. The two work well together: the wheel of life shows which part of your life is short, and a list of self-care ideas gives you ways to fill it. If fun and rest is your lowest slice, the types of rest quiz shows which kind of rest you are missing, and a dopamine menu gives you small, ready-made ways to get some back.

Your numbers are personal. A 5 for money means something different to everyone, so there are no norms and no good or bad scores: compare your wheel with your own last wheel, not with anyone else's. Mood also colors every slice. On a heavy day, everything looks lower, so rate on an ordinary day if you can, and look at the trend over a few months.

If several areas stay low for months, or you feel low most days whatever the wheel says, the wheel is not the right tool for that. Track how you are doing day to day with the 60-second check-in, and talk to a doctor or a licensed mental health professional.

Each area in the tool links to one next step. Sleep Calculator for sleep and energy. Couples Check-In for love life. Social Battery for friends and family. Burnout Test for work. Energy Audit for health and energy. Journal Prompts for growth and meaning. At the end of the year, the end of year reflection questions pair well with a fresh wheel.