Life Roles: A Tool For Helping Me to Live an Intentional Life
For the past year and a half, I have been taking life roles inventory and planning retreats every six months. These retreats were based on the system outlined in David Spark’s Personal Retreat Video And Planning Pdf. I’ve written about my experiences here and here. During my retreat last week, I followed the guide by Sparks on how to do Mid-Year Reflection And Planning.
I found that, for me, taking a life roles inventory enabled me to determine what things were important to me from a practical standpoint. Writing an “ideal description” of how I would look in each role helped me set my specific intentions for living my life.
Identifying my life roles helped me to find out what’s important to me; writing life goal ideal descriptions helped me to define my intentions.
During my bi-annual retreats and weekly reviews, I have consistently reviewed and reworked my roles and checked on whether my action items had been accomplished. On the retreat I did last week, I tried to come at the process with “new eyes,” did a complete rework of my ideal role descriptions, and came up with a new role.
Rewriting My Life Roles Descriptions as Bullet Points Makes Reviews More Effective
In the past, each of my life roles ideal descriptions was written in paragraph form. While this format did include the information I wanted in the description, I found that it was not the best format to make weekly reviews effective.
I’m lazy. When I see a whole paragraph of densely packed information, my inclination is to just scan it rather than reading closely.
My natural laziness means that when I’d do my weekly roles reviews (How am I doing? Where could I improve? Where am I doing good?), I’d often miss specific role descriptions. They’d get lost in the middle of the paragraph, and I wouldn’t properly consider them.
During this last retreat, I decided to rewrite all of my ideal role descriptions, both revising the content and changing the format to bullet points. Now, when I do a review, each point stands out much more clearly.
An Example: My Ideal Description of my Healthy Person Role
When I started my last retreat, my ideal description for my Healthy Person role was in paragraph format:
As I age, I value maintaining and improving my health, balance, and mobility. I regularly exercise, take supplements and medications, eat healthy foods, get annual flu immunizations, go to the doctor for help and regular checkups, and monitor my blood pressure. I keep my weight down by dieting and exercising. I have systems set up to cover all aspects of my health. I review those systems regularly to ensure I am acting on my health goals.
As you can see, the information, though contained in the paragraph, is very difficult to see and process without meticulous reading.
Here is the revised role description in bullet point format:
- By regularly exercising I maintain and improve my health, balance, and mobility.
- I stay healthy by doing these things:
- Engage in regular walking and/or hiking every other day.
- Do yoga on Apple Fitness+ every other day.
- Take supplements and medications.
- Eat healthy foods.
- Get annual flu immunizations.
- Go to the doctor when needed.
- I keep my weight down by dieting and exercising.
- I use the FoodNoms App every day to track calories.
- I keep my total calories within my daily limit.
- I monitor my blood pressure every other day.
It takes up more space on the page, but to me is much clearer. I can graphically see the major points and the sub-points under each topic.
Try Writing Your Life Role Ideal Descriptions as Bullet Points to Increase Review Effectiveness
Using bullet points instead of paragraphs helps me to see each element of the description. The friction of having to closely read through the paragraph is significantly reduced by changing the format to bullet points.
This should result in much more effective weekly and quarterly reviews. And that’s the whole point of having a productivity system; not just doing many things more efficiently, but rather doing the things that matter. That’s the core of my effort to live an intentional life.
If you’re using a system like this, I encourage you to write or rewrite your role descriptions as bullet points instead of paragraphs.