Life Audit: How to Run One, and How Loosely to Hold the Result

A life audit is a wide, scored look at every area of your life at once, run rarely, usually once a year. You rate each area, find the gaps, and pick a small number of things to change. It takes about twenty minutes.

I run one every year as an anchor point to look back and think about the bigger picture, on top of a structured written reflection I have done every week for more than five years. This is how I run it, and then the part every other article on this leaves out: how much of the result you should trust.

What a Life Audit Is, and What It Is Not

The confusing thing about this topic is that two different exercises share the same vocabulary. They do different jobs and you want both.

The audit is the wide-angle lens. It is bad at detail and good at showing you the thing you have not looked at in eighteen months. If you only do one of the two, do the weekly one, because that is where the compounding is. The audit is what stops the weekly practice from optimising a direction you no longer want.

The Categories, and How to Choose Yours

Eight is enough. Each one gets a single question, because a category you cannot score in one sentence is two categories.

One rule about choosing your own categories: do not invent a category you know you will score well in. It is the most common way to run this exercise and feel good while learning nothing. If a category makes you slightly uncomfortable to write down, keep it.

Score Each Area 1 to 10, in One Pass

Twenty minutes, one sitting, no research.

• Write the number before the reason. The first number that comes to mind is the honest one. The reason you write afterwards is usually a negotiation with it.
• Any score of 8 or above needs one piece of evidence from the last month. Not a plan, not an intention, something that happened. No evidence, drop it a point. This single rule is what stops the whole exercise from becoming a self-image maintenance ritual.
• Do not adjust scores after seeing the pattern. You will want to. The pattern is the output.

Read the Gaps, Not the Wheel

Most write-ups have you look for the lowest score. That is the obvious read and it is not the useful one.

The useful signal is the distance between a score and the attention that area received. An area at 4 that you have been working on all year is fine, it is in progress. An area at 6 that you have not thought about once is the finding, because a 6 does not hurt enough to demand attention and will sit there for a decade. The low scores announce themselves. The mid scores are where the quiet drift lives.

So next to each score, write one word: rising, flat, or falling. A flat 6 is the most actionable cell on the sheet.

Pick Two. Not Five

Two areas for the year. Not three, and definitely not the four or five that the scores will suggest.

I know this from the weekly record rather than from theory. Reading back over years of entries, the periods where something genuinely changed are the periods where I was carrying one or two things. The years I listed five priorities are indistinguishable from the years I listed none.

One Action per Area, Sized to This Week

An action you cannot start within seven days is a wish with a deadline attached.

• Not "get fit" but "swim Tuesday and Thursday mornings, booked in the calendar tonight".
• Not "be better with money" but "one hour on Sunday to see what the last three months cost".
• Not "invest in friendships" but "message the three people I have been meaning to for a year, today".

What the Audit Cannot Tell You

Here is the part I have not found in any other article on this, and it is the reason I still run the exercise without being run by it.

Only a few things in a life can be planned. The older I get, the more I go with the flow, and that is not resignation, it is accuracy. Look at any five-year stretch and the things that mattered most split three ways: a small number you planned and got, a similar number you planned and did not get, and a surprisingly large number that arrived on no plan at all and turned out to be the important ones.

I have a dated record of five years to check that against, which is the one advantage a long practice gives you: you can go back and read what you thought was going to happen. The plans are not the interesting part of those entries. The unplanned arrivals are.

What I trust instead is a posture rather than a plan: put genuine effort into the things you want, stay pro-active and action-biased, stay reflective and self-critical, and at the same time do not take your own life too seriously. In the game of life you are also allowed to ride the wave and enjoy it.

Held that way, the audit does something honest and modest. It tells you where to push. It tells you nothing about what will happen. Run it fully, take it seriously for twenty minutes, then put it in a drawer and go live the year.

Where Life Audits Go Wrong

Four failure modes, all of which I have managed personally:

• Score inflation. Every area sits between 6 and 8 and nothing is decided. Fix: the evidence rule above, and force at least one score below 5.
• Auditing too often. Run monthly, the scores stop measuring your life and start measuring your mood that Sunday. Fix: annually, and use a weekly written reflection for everything in between.
• The audit as a substitute for a decision. If you already know you need to leave the job, end the relationship, or move, an audit will let you feel productive about it for another year. Fix: if you can name the decision, skip the audit and go make it. I have written separately about how I make those calls.
• Scoring areas you are not willing to change. Honest scores on things you have decided to accept are just a way to feel bad annually. Fix: either accept the score and stop scoring it, or move it into your two.

How Often, and What to Run in Between

The audit sets direction once a year, the weekly practice does the work, and the daily capture is optional. If you want the questions rather than the scoring instrument, I keep a set indexed by situation, and how a weekly entry reads is written up with a genuine example.

The Scoring Sheet

Copy this, fill in three columns, and you have run it.

Then two circled areas, one action each, sized to this week. That is the whole exercise. The twenty minutes are worth it once a year. The other fifty-one weeks are for living the thing you just audited.