Happiness Wheel Exercise

Brief: A few years ago I was working with a business coach named John Nieuwenburg. One exercise he gave me was the happiness wheel. This exercise changed my life – I realized I wasn’t spending enough time on the things that made me happy. Are you?

I’ve modified the exercise a bit to make it, in my opinion, more effective. The original exercise can be found via a Google Search here.

Step 1: Grab a piece of blank paper and draw a circle with 8 pie pieces. Fill out each pie piece with the top 8 areas of life that are important to you and give each pie piece (area of happiness) a ranking out of 10. Here is an example:

Image taken from Positive Living Now.

Step 2: After you rank each area, connect the dots in order.

Image taken from Positive Living Now.

Step 3: Here is my modification! Outside of each area, write down how many hours each week you invest in that activity or area.

Is there a correlation between how well something is going and how much time you are investing in it? With exception to your job, you probably don’t invest enough time into other areas of life that matter to you.

Step 4: What would be perfect? In a perfect world, how much time (or money) would you need to invest in each category to rank your happiness within that category a 10 out of 10? The way I see it, there are 112 hours in a week (if you eliminate 8 hours / day for sleep) – If you are not investing as much of this time into things that matter to you, you have some work to do.

Step 5: Make Meaningful Improvements! Now that you know what categories are important to you, how happy you are within each category, how much time you are investing in each category, and how much time is required to achieve happiness within each category you are in a much better position to make meaningful improvements.

Start by trying to cut out time consuming activities with little benefit – or optimize time consuming activities with something constructive. Use any additional time to invest in areas of life that matter to YOU.