Welcome to the nerdy lists project! Each week I publish a new list about habits and personal growth.
List #2 is Steve Pavlina’s eleven areas of personal assessment. These 11 categories are a mece way to assess your life performance. About once a month (or when I’m lazy, once a quarter), I review each item on the list and give a score between 1-10. Steve recommends that you replace any rating below 9 with a 1, for motivation (this I haven’t done).
The categories are curated from his book, Personal Development for Smart People [link]. His blog is incredible, too, and Derek Sivers has great notes from the book.
Steve Pavlina’s 11 Personal Assessment Categories
Pavlina’s essential question: how do you routinely measure and monitor the important areas of your life?
in each category, I provide an example of a personal benchmark
1. Habits & Daily routine: did I average 7 hours of sleep a night?
2. Career & work: did I focus on one main project instead of several side projects?
3. Money & finances: was I able to invest some money this month?
4. Health & fitness: did I exercise at least 4 days each week?
5. Mental development & education: did I finish at least one book?
6. Social life & relationships: did I hangout with friends every weekend?
7. Home & family: did I call Mom at least once a week?
8. Emotions: did I meditate 10 minutes each day?
9. Character & integrity: did I not gossip? (I hate gossip)
10. Life purpose & contribution: have I published at least once a week to Kevin Habits?
11. Spiritual development: did I go to Church at least once, and/or read the Bible (and other religious texts) regularly?
Since October 2008, I’ve completed this exercise. Some categories have persistently low ratings, and I struggle with improvement. Also, I should analyze my scores and identify trends. I did this, once, and a conclusion I can remember was that calling Mom more often was correlated with higher average scores. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to maintain that particular habit :)
In general Steve has great essays on habits (my favorite technology for behavior change). Here are some:
- Why you should add the best and drop the worst habits: Be down to earth and specific. When you choose a specific habit, there will be a clear and sharp dividing line between success and failure. Either you did the action or you didn’t. There’s no gray area in the middle.
- How to keep up not-quite daily habits: I find that when I occasionally skip habits that are part of a longer daily chain, it’s fairly easy to put them back in again as long as I continue to maintain the first and last links in the chain.
Thanks for reading! What are your favorite lists? Here’s the full index, including what’s to come.