Wheel of Life Categories: 8 Life Areas and How to Pick Yours

There’s no single list; eight areas make a good start: health, work and career, money, family and partner, friends and community, personal growth, fun and hobbies, home and surroundings. Swap an area that isn’t yours, split one that’s too broad, and define what a 10 looks like in each.

How to fill in the wheel itself is part one: the wheel of life: what it is and how to fill it in.

The eight areas explained

The names are an example, not a canon. For each area: what goes into it, what a 10 might look like, and a question that helps you score it. The 10s are composites from different people — yours will be your own.

1. Health. Sleep, movement, how you feel, energy for the day. A 10: “I sleep 7+ hours five nights out of seven and swim twice a week.” Question: do I have the energy for what I want to do?
2. Work and career. What you do, how you grow, whether you like the results. A 10: “I work on problems that interest me and I know where I’m heading this year.” Question: would I want to be doing this a year from now?
3. Money. Income, spending, savings, debt — and how calm you feel about them. A 10: “I have three months of savings and I’m not counting the days to payday.” Question: how much of my thinking about money is anxious?
4. Family and partner. Partner, family, children, parents. A 10: “We eat dinner together most evenings and spend one evening a week with no chores.” Question: do I have enough time and warmth with the people closest to me?
5. Friends and community. Friends, colleagues, communities, people you’re at ease with. A 10: “I see friends a couple of times a month and there’s someone to call on a bad day.” Question: are there people around me I feel good with?
6. Personal growth. Learning, new knowledge and skills, books, courses. A 10: “I’m learning something I chose myself and I can see progress over a month.” Question: did I learn anything last month that changed me?
7. Fun and hobbies. Hobbies, holidays, anything you do just because. A 10: “My weekends are mine, and there’s something I look forward to doing in them.” Question: when did I last rest in a way that actually restored me?
8. Home and surroundings. Home, city, daily routine, workspace. A 10: “My flat is comfortable, things are where they belong, and work is twenty minutes away.” Question: does what’s around me help me or get in my way?

The sleep and exercise examples are personal criteria, not medical guidelines. Everyone defines their own 10 for health.

Areas people often add or split

• Meaning, or spirituality. Not necessarily religious: it’s the sense that your life is going where it matters to you — values, faith, philosophy, practices like meditation. If this is a live question for you, give it its own spoke.
• Creativity. Music, drawing, writing, making things. It often hides inside “fun”, though for many people it’s a separate need.
• Contribution. Volunteering, helping others, mentoring — the things you do not for yourself.
• Adventure. Experiences, travel, novelty. Different from rest: rest restores you, adventure fills you up.
• Family separate from partner. If your relationship with your parents or children has a life of its own, one score for everything mixes up different things. Split them.

How many areas: 4, 6, 8 or 12

• 4 areas — a quick check, say once a week: work, family, health, fun. Rough, but it takes five minutes.
• 6–8 areas — the working option. Mindtools suggests exactly that, six to eight: enough to see your whole life, few enough that scores don’t blur together.
• 12 areas — more precise, but the scores start to repeat each other: “fun”, “hobbies” and “adventure” will get almost the same number.

The rule is simple: no more areas than you’re ready to score honestly in 20 minutes. If you catch yourself reaching for “eh, a 5” on some spoke, you probably have too many.

A wheel of roles

Instead of life areas, you can use roles: parent, partner, professional, manager, friend, yourself. Mindtools offers this option alongside life areas, and a mix of the two.

Roles work better when you have many of them and they compete for your time. Take a developer with a small child: as areas, “work and career” is an 8 and “family and partner” a 6 — bearable, it seems. As roles, the picture is different: “professional” 8, “parent” 7, “myself” 2. That last number is the finding: the areas didn’t show it.

Narrow wheels

You can use the same shape for a single area. A career wheel, for example: tasks, pay, growth, team, manager, work–life balance. Or a health wheel: sleep, movement, food, energy, mood. It isn’t a separate method, just the same technique applied to one area — useful when your overall wheel shows a dip and you want to know where exactly.

How to define a 10

This is the most useful part of the preparation. For each area, write one sentence describing what a 10 looks like for you personally. Three rules:

1. Present tense, as if it’s already true: “I sleep 7+ hours”, not “I’ll get enough sleep”.
2. Observable. Something you could check in a month rather than just feel: “I sleep 7+ hours five nights out of seven” instead of “my health is great”.
3. Next to the wheel. Keep your 10s on the same sheet or in the same note, so you score against the same yardstick every time.

Without a written 10, a 6 in March and a 6 in September are different 6s. With one, the score answers “how far am I from what I wrote down”, and that’s much easier.

You can change the descriptions — life changes. But change them with a note (the date and what you changed), or your new wheel can’t be compared with the old one.

What to avoid

• Overlapping areas. If “work” and “money” are the same thing for you, merge them — otherwise you’ll score one thing twice and skew the wheel.
• Areas you’re not ready to score honestly. Better to drop a spoke than to give it a token 5. A hollow number is worse than none.
• Other people’s lists wholesale. Starting from a ready-made list is fine; keeping the parts that don’t matter to you isn’t.

What next

Your list of areas is ready and your 10s are written down — time to fill in the wheel if you haven’t yet, or to redo it with the new yardsticks. How to do it in 20 minutes is part one: the wheel of life: what it is and how to fill it in. Your own areas fit easily into the life balance wheel template: it has 3 to 12 segments, and you can rename any of them.

Once the wheel is done, the next step is to work out what it’s telling you and pick one or two areas to change. That’s part three: how to read your wheel of life and decide what to change. Turning the chosen area into a goal and a slot in your calendar is part four: from wheel of life to goals.