Each of us shows up to life in different ways at different times. We can think of this as wearing a variety of hats.

Let’s figure out which hats you wear—or, put differently, what “areas” are relevant in your life. Or, to say it in yet another way, what “roles” you play.

After you watch the video, write down your list of areas. Use the workbook exercise to guide you.

The app I use in the video is Bear. And my podcast is How They Get Stuff Done.

Video transcript

[00:00:00] I want you to achieve your goals, but before we talk about what your goals are, before we figure out what your goals are, we got to do something else. So we all show up in life in different ways. For example, you might be a tennis player, a spouse and a lawyer. So you show up as a tennis player, as a spouse, as a lawyer at different times, in a different places. Right. And there's a whole lot of other things going on in your life. So we can think of these as which hats do you wear? That's one of my favorite ways to look at this.

[00:00:31] You can also think of life as a play. If life is a play, what roles do you play in that play? Right like what characters are you taking on? And we can refer to these things as areas in your life. Right? So maybe tennis is an area in your life. Family is an area in your life, and practicing law could be an area in your life. So what I want you to do is I want you to make a list of which areas are relevant in your life. And what we're going to do later on is we're going to identify some goals, some projects and some tasks that you may have in each of these areas.

[00:01:05] Okay, let me give you an example. Okay, so look over here with me in my notes. So I want you to do this in anywhere—in your notes app, Apple notes, whatever. On paper, it doesn't matter. Just make a list somewhere, OK? Could be in your task manager if you have a task manager. I'm just gonna say my life areas is what I'm going to call this. So let's use this as an example of someone who likes to play tennis as a hobby, who is married and who also practices law. OK, so we've definitely got tennis and so we've got family and we've got law practice right now. I like to alphabetize these, so let's do that. Family law practice and tennis.

[00:01:49] OK, so this is a basic organization, but there are other things that everybody has to deal with. So one area that I like to think of, I call it admin and finances. So we all have administration to take care of. We all have money matters to take care of. And I find that those two kind of overlap a lot. So I like to put those in an admin and finances area. You can imagine you may have goals here, such as get my accounting up to date. You have a business like me, right? Could be a goal. You may have projects, you may have tasks like recurring tasks every year, like filed my tax return or something like that, or like sign up for new insurance. So anyway, you can imagine having admin and finance tasks projects. So that's why it helps to have an area for that so that we can organize those things later.

[00:02:33] Okay. Um, everybody has home stuff going on, so we all have things around the home, buy groceries, fix the broken door, you know, home tasks, and you may have home goals as well. Maybe you want to renovate your garage or something like that. Maybe you want to turn it into a small office or something like that. Right. In fact, one of my students who enrolled in Big-Picture Productivity, he's been doing just that for a while, I think, inspired by the pandemic, the covid-19 pandemic. Right. He was working from home lot and he was like, you know what? I should really convert my garage into an office so that both his wife and he have a space to work at home that's very comfortable. So we all have home stuff going on.

[00:03:14] I recommend thinking of a health area which could be your mental health, your physical health or both. You could split those out if you wanted to. But just having a health area like this helps later when we're going to think about what are your goals, you're going to probably going have some health goals, right?

[00:03:29] I like to have a relationships area. So this is a bit different. If you have family, this could probably be like non-family relationships, you know, up to you what you call it. But just thinking about maintaining relationships with friends, acquaintances or, you know, maybe like not at work. Right. But people who are in some kind of way want to stay connected with and maybe have some goals related to that. Some projects, some tasks. Right.

[00:03:58] I like to have a fun area. And you can call this adventure as well. Maybe. So for me, this one often includes things like figuring out where my next scuba diving trip is going to go to. Right. That may be a task in the fun area, although I say that. But I actually I like to have a trips area as well. So maybe that would go in trips and fun would be like check out this new go kart track, you know, near my city, which just opened. I want to go check it out because I think it'd be fun. And I do like to go go karting every now and then. I don't really do it often. By the way, that's not some that's not a skill that I have, but it's fun to do so.

[00:04:32] You can see how I'm building this selection of areas of my life. And I want you to think about which areas you need. OK, so you may not need that many. And depending on whether you have a job or a business, it may also be different for you. So, for example, for me, I have a podcast, it's called How They Get Stuff Done. I’ll link to that, by the way, you should listen to it if you haven't already. And so I might have a podcast area. Right. So because I consider myself a podcast or like podcasts or is is a hat that I wear. I'm a member of Toastmasters, a public speaking organization. And so I like to have a Toastmasters area because I think of the toastmaster who practices his public speaking ability.

[00:05:12] So I might do that like this, but for you it may be fewer areas or more areas. And if you have a business, you're going to have all kinds of business things. For example, I have a marketing area, right? I have a course development area. And so and so you quickly get to a lot of areas. Don't go crazy with this. Like, if you're ending up at twenty, there's probably too many soldiers delete some of these because I think this is probably more representative for most people to have an area division like this anyway. It's not rocket science. It's not like if you get one thing wrong, the rockets are going to blow up. It's not like that.

[00:05:45] But what I want you to do now before you move on to the next lesson is just make this simple division of your life. What hats do you wear? Right. What roles do you play? What areas does it make sense to divide your life into? Just go ahead and do that. Keep it, I don't know, aim for maybe ten or something like that. Well, let's aim for five to 15. So go ahead and do that now.