Creating a Dashboard for Life

Creating a tool to align our actions with our intentions.

Howdy 🤠

I’ll keep the preamble short this week and simply say that I truly appreciate the time and energy you’re taking to read and reflect on the ideas and prompts below.

If you ever have any suggestions, requests, or complaints, please don’t hesitate to hit reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin

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Creating a Dashboard for Life

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

You don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket, but you should have a couple of baskets to put your eggs into.

Brad Stalberg

Fish aren’t upset that they’re not good walkers, but many humans are upset they’re not great swimmers.

A huge piece of our happiness depends on our sense of self, so the way we define ourselves is critical to the way we feel about ourselves.

The sense of self spectrum ranges from narrow to broad. Those with a narrow sense of self define themselves in the context of only 1-2 areas of life while those with a broad sense of self define themselves in many different contexts.

Derek Thompson defines Workism, a common example of a narrow sense of self, as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose”. Thinking this narrowly about our sense of sense in any area is fragile, but moving too far in the other direction creates a new set of problems.

Those with a broad sense of self have a more flexible view of their identity, but because their efforts are spread out across many domains that are important to them, they never perform as well as they’d like in any area of their lives.

Moving away from a singular sense of self is an important step to becoming a bit better each day, but the question becomes how can we diversify our sense of self without diluting our efforts in each pursuit.

The first step toward balancing the different areas of our lives is understanding how they interact with one another. Focusing on fitness is usually a relatively short time commitment, but the effects on health, mood, and energy make everything else so much easier, that it’s a highly leveraged way to spend our time. Focusing on our career is usually draining and prevents us from doing other things we value, but without any money, we can’t do much of anything.

Some areas of life are additive, and others are necessary evils, but once we understand the relationships between them in our own lives, we know how we fall on the sense of self spectrum and we can add, subtract, or fine-tune our priorities accordingly.

We can realize that a time-consuming hobby might be holding us back from more important pursuits or that we should be investing more time and energy in our family/friends or our exercise routine. Maybe we’ve had our identity wrapped up in one thing for years and we realize it’s time to try something new.

Whatever the realizations are, this exercise gives us the ability to see the most meaningful and leveraged activities in our lives.

While this knowledge is a powerful step in the right direction, knowledge alone is not enough to create lasting change. To change our habits, beliefs, and actions we need a plan to change and a system to monitor our progress.

With the diverse areas of our lives defined and prioritized, we can create a dashboard for our lives to remind us of our ideal balance and keep us accountable to move us forward. Each area of life gets a metric or a heuristic to guide us in the right direction. For work it might be as simple as hitting quarterly objectives and for family/friends it might be something a bit fuzzier like accepting every invitation within an hour’s drive.

This provides a gut check for our lives that can fit on an index card.

We can use the dashboard as a guide to plan our week or our month and honestly assess if our actions match our intentions.

It doesn’t eliminate the complexity and nuance required to live a fulfilling and balanced life, but it creates a simple and powerful way to diversify our sense of self without diluting our efforts.

Prompts

1. Where do you fall on the sense of self spectrum?

2. What is the one area of your life that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?

3. Do the metrics or heuristics on your dashboard feel attainable or out of reach?

Deep Dive

• How To Master Change: This One Idea Might Change Your Entire Life

  • An interview from Cal Newport’s Deep Questions podcast with Brad Stalberg, author of Master of Change.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin