Creating a Dashboard for Life
Creating a tool to align our actions with our intentions.
Howdy đ€
Iâll keep the preamble short this week and simply say that I truly appreciate the time and energy youâre taking to read and reflect on the ideas and prompts below.
If you ever have any suggestions, requests, or complaints, please donât hesitate to hit reply and let me know.
Thanks for reading!
Kevin
Creating a Dashboard for Life
You donât 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 arenât upset that theyâre not good walkers, but many humans are upset theyâre 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 âthe belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of oneâs identity and lifeâs purposeâ. 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 theyâd 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 itâs 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 canât 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 weâve had our identity wrapped up in one thing for years and we realize itâs 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 hourâs 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 doesnât 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
Where do you fall on the sense of self spectrum?
What is the one area of your life that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?
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 Newportâs Deep Questions podcast with Brad Stalberg, author of Master of Change.
Thanks for reading! Iâll see you next Sunday.
Kevin
I appreciate what you brought in this weekâs post. I know for myself from a few career changes that Iâve had in my lifetime how much my sense of identity is tied up with what I do for work. I also see many friends with families that bring them their biggest sense of identity. Iâve struggled myself without a traditional family, not only because I feel like I might be missing out, but because I donât know who I am in the society without one.
Over time, Iâve come to find my sense of identity from other areas in my life. One way is by considering myself a spiritual being and identifying with improvement through meditation, yoga, and positive actions.