🖊️ How to Do a Life Audit

Hey there! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. If you’re new around here, welcome! 👋  You can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: The new year is right around the corner — now’s the perfect time to take stock of your life and make a gameplan for 2025 and beyond. We’ll walk you through how to audit your life, plus how to tell if you need to. Let’s jump in!

🤔 What’s a Life Audit?

This exercise basically involves analyzing each area of your life to understand where you are right now, where you’d like to go next, and what you need to do to get there.

A life audit requires some lite journaling, but it’s a gamechanger for practicing self-care and getting reoriented on your personal growth journey.

You might benefit from a life audit if you:

• 🫥 Haven’t checked in with yourself in awhile

• 😓 Feel overwhelmed, depleted, stuck, or incapable

• 😵‍💫 Spend lots of time “doomscrolling” or consuming content

Now that you know what it’s all about, scroll on to discover 5 ways this exercise can level up your life.

⚡️ 5 Key Benefits of a Life Audit

A life audit can help you:

• Figure out what you really want and how to get there

• Feel more in control of your life

• Clear out all those lingering to-dos and open loops taking up space in your brain

• Untangle tricky emotions, behaviors, and thought patterns

• Reconnect with yourself, especially if you’ve been giving most of your energy to everyone else

Before reading on, pause to grab a glass of water and your trusty journal. Once you’re comfy, we’ll walk you through the 5-step process!

🖊️ How to Audit Your Life in 5 Steps

Here’s your step-by-step guide for starting a life audit. Feel free to tweak it and make it work for you!

💭 Step 1: List all areas of your life

In a physical or digital journal, map out the main areas of your life in whatever format makes the most sense to you. Your areas might look different, but here are some general ideas:

• 🎓 Professional: Work, education, skills you want to develop

• 🏡 Personal: Home, hobbies, relationships

• 🫀 Health: Physical, mental, emotional wellbeing

🔬 Step 2: Check in with each area

For each area, ask yourself:

• How important is this part of my life?

• Am I happy with where I’m at right now?

• How do I feel about this area, and how would I like to feel instead?

While there are no wrong answers here, try not to compare yourself to others, or fixate on where you “should” be. If you find yourself spiraling into self-judgment, pause for a bit and try again later.

🏆 Step 3: Highlight your wins

Celebrating your wins is a great way to balance out any tricky emotions that might come up from your audit. It can also boost your mood and help you give thanks for the good things in your life.

And if you can’t think of any wins for an area? That just means it needs some extra care and attention. Watch out for the tiny wins, too — they all count!

🖊️ Step 4: Dump out all your goals and to-dos

What do you need to do to get where you want to be?

List out as many steps as you can think of, but no pressure to complete your list in one sitting. You’ll undoubtedly pick up new action items along the way.

Spend some time exploring your goals for each area, too. Go as shallow or deep as you want here — whatever works best.

🧖 Step 5: Pamper yourself

Before diving straight into your list, take an extended break.

It takes a lot of energy and brainpower to analyze your whole life like this! And you’ll need all the rest and energy you can get before continuing on your way.

You’re probably doing your life audit because you’re feeling drained in some way, right? So take some time to pour back into your cup. Treat yourself with something fun and totally self-indulgent.

🪅 Flocus Picks

A curated list of things worth sharing.

• chill winter lofi mix (Playlist) — For our friends in the northern hemisphere, this relaxing playlist is the perfect soundtrack to those chilly winter evenings

• upbeat summer lofi & bossanova beats (Playlist) — And for our pals down south, heat up your deep work sessions with this energetic Latin-inspired mix

• How to Have More Fun (Article) — Camille Styles explores “fake” fun, plus more ways to add “true” fun to your life

🖥️ Flocus: Your Personal Productivity Dashboard

Ready to take stock of your life and move forward with intention? Flocus makes it easy to turn your audit into action.

With a customizable focus timer, task list, serene ambient worlds, and soundscapes, we’ll help you stay on track while balancing work, reflection, and self care ✨

Now’s a great time to get aligned for 2025 before winding down over winter break. (Or summer, for our friends in the southern hemisphere!)

The life audit is one of our team’s favorite end-of-year exercises — we hope you get as much out of it as we do.

Will you try doing a life audit this month? Let us know with a quick reply!

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team