Should You Perform A Life Audit?
Have you ever conducted a life audit? Life can get messy, and as such, it pays to evaluate everything you have going and any goals you are trying to work towards. We all know how important it is to conduct a financial audit regularly to make sure your finances are in the best possible shape, but applying that to all areas of your life can help you to take stock and make my changes you need to make.
How do you perform a successful life audit and how do you know if you need to take stock of your life and evaluate where you are headed compared to where you want to go and what you want from your life?
Contents
Choose An Area to Audit
Break your life down into different departments, then list them in order of urgency or most beneficial to you.
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Areas you can audit can include;
- Fitness levels
- Diet
- Personal loans
- Subscriptions
- Sleep quality
- Health
- Habits
- Career
- Happiness
- Home
Choose your Defining Metrics
You need to be able to measure your success in each area, and as such, you need a measure of how successful you are or might not be in each area to evaluate fully.
For example, if you want to measure your happiness, why not try setting the alarm on your phone every few hours and jotting down how you feel. At work, write about how well you are advancing in your career, what is blocking you, and working for you for your career path.
Maybe you want to set yourself some questions to answer to fully gauge where you are at in each part of your life.
Chart Your Audit
A successful audit requires you to take records on where you are now and where you need to be. Seeing this written down in a spreadsheet, graph or chart can help you visualize the audit better and give yourself a starting block for changes.
Compare your ‘where you are now’ chart to one showing where you want to be compared.
Create an Action Plan
Once you have your current starting place and your end goals, you can get yourself from the now to projected changes.
Ask yourself why you feel the need to change things, how you can effectively change it and how long you think you need to get there realistically.
This could be taking those driving lessons to help you get a car and potentially change your career if you want to do this. It could be you feel you need to overhaul your diet and you want to make sure you are eating better, so buying cookery books, taking cooking classes, or limiting how many times you dine out each week can be a start.
Make adjustments
As you follow this journey on the outcome of your life audit, you may find some goals or changes are unrealistic, and as such, allowing yourself to make any changes needed to refocus. Doing so regularly will allow you to assess your goals, re-audit your lifestyle and focus on new changes you want to make or new life goals you wish to incorporate.
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Good luck!
Ken Boyd
Author: Cost Accounting for Dummies, Accounting All-In-One for Dummies, The CPA Exam for Dummies and 1,001 Accounting Questions for Dummies
(email) ken@stltest.net
(website and blog) https://www.accountingaccidentally.com/