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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Wheel of Life.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. Today we’re going to do an exercise. How fun’s that? Recently, we did an exercise at the monthly team meeting of the SuperDataScience Team. We were talking about the Wheel of Life.
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Today we’re going to do a similar exercise. Not exactly the same one, in the interest of time, but you’ll be able to do it just in your mind. You don’t even need a pen and paper. Hopefully, it’ll give you some insights.
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First of all, what is the Wheel of Life? Wheel of Life, also known as the Life Balance Wheel, the Coaching Wheel, or the Life Wheel, is basically a visual tool that helps you assess how balanced your life is at present. The notion here is that we often can get caught up in focusing a lot of our time, effort, energy into one specific area of our life, or one or two, and forget and neglect other ones. If that happens for a prolonged period of time, then you can experience emotional burnout, or you can just… Mostly it’s emotional burnout, but also, you can just feel not as fulfilled, not as happy, not living to your full potential, and not enjoying life to the fullest.
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Today, we’re going to do a quick exercise to see how you are going with balance in your life. Wheel of Life… If you happen to have a pen and paper beside you, you can use those for sure. Otherwise, just imagine this in your mind. Basically, it’s a circle. A wheel split into eight pieces, so basically, cut up into eight segments. Every segment will have a title. Then, you can fill in each segment from zero, if it’s empty, or going from the center, filling in that segment more and more and more from zero to 10 based on your answer. Then, that way, you construct the wheel of life. All these different proportionate parts, it looks like a radio diagram, something along those lines.
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So simple as that. But don’t worry if you don’t have a pen and paper beside you. Not a worry at all. Just answer the questions in your mind from zero to 10, and then note down where your answers are quite low.
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Okay, here we go. We’re going to go through the eight areas of life. You need to answer from zero to 10, how much time? There’s different approaches to this. I like the approach of, how much time did you spend in this area of your life, let’s say, in the past week? In the past week, the week that has come to an end, let’s say, including the previous weekend, so total seven days, from today, backwards seven days. If you’re doing this on the Friday, then that would be including the previous weekend. How much time, from zero to 10, how would you rate the amount of time that you spent on your work? Just think of a number. For most people, it’s probably, if you’re actively working and putting in a lot of hours into it, probably like an eight, nine, or a 10. But how much does it feel from zero to 10?
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Okay, cool. How much time in the past week did you spend with family and friends? Also, put down any number in your mind. Now, in the past week, how much time did you spend on your finances?
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How much time did you spend on your personal growth, like learning stuff? Actually, personal or professional growth, sorry. Any growth, whether it’s learning stuff about yourself, learning a new language, learning a musical instrument, learning something for work, a tool for… basically, growth, learning things.
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Okay. How much time did you spend on your physical environment, for instance, cleaning your house or apartment, focusing on the ergonomics? Making sure you’re sitting right or standing right. Things like that. Things that surround you, where you are spending your time. Okay. Plants, also, physical environment, watering the plants.
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Next category is fun and recreation. How much time did you spend on fun and recreation? We’re actually going to include all leisure activities in here and emotional health. These categories are arbitrary, and you can come up with your own Wheel of Life. In this case, from trying out a few times, I think I prefer to include emotional health into fun and recreation. How much time did you spend in fun, recreation, emotional health? Things like maybe playing a video game, or watching a movie, or meditating? Yes, it’s funny that they end up in one category. But in terms of recreation, it’s all designed to help calm down the mind or distract with other things. I know it’s a bit bizarre, but, of course, you can have your own categories. But for the sake of this exercise, fun, recreation, emotional health, playing with a dog, or lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, reading a science fiction book, how much time did you spend on that?
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Right, next category is love. That is with your significant other. How much time did you spend with your life partner or dating, or maybe your personal situation, your preference is different. Maybe, you’ve decided that you don’t want to be in a relationship. You can feel free to replace this category with something else that matters to you. How much time did you spend on that?
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Finally, your eighth category or our eighth category is physical health. How much time did you spend on physical health from zero to 10? How would you rate the amount of time you invested into your physical health, exercise, going for a walk, morning exercise, doing some yoga, or stretches before bed and things like that, things that, take care of your body?
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There we go. Those are our eight categories. I’m going to go through them again, just naming them slowly, and just remember the score you put, and wherever you had a score of less than five, maybe it’s something to look into. At least one area you probably found where you didn’t invest enough time. Maybe it’s just this kind of week, maybe if you look back at the whole month, then it is okay, or an average throughout the month. But that’s the next step. Is it just this week, or is it a pattern that you’re under-investing time into this specific area? Just try to remember the scores that you gave yourself, work, family and friends, finances, growth, physical environment, fun/recreation/emotional health, love, and physical health.
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There we go, those eight categories. It’s often a wake-up call. If there is something that is lacking, it’s better to address it early, sooner rather than later. Ideally, if you can have a balanced life, of course, there are going to be some oscillations here and there. But overall, if you’re investing time into all these areas, then that is arguably a great way to be spending your time.
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There we go. Hope you enjoyed today, and maybe you got something useful out of it. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
