A Simple Way to Improve Your Life Everyday

I love to have simple ways to improve my life. Everyday is a chance for improving our life, and it’s up to us to best use it. What I want is to have good, balanced progress everyday.

To ensure balance, my favorite way is using the four facets of prosperity: material, spiritual, physical, and social. By achieving material prosperity, spiritual prosperity, physical prosperity, and social prosperity, I believe I can have complete and balanced prosperity in my life.

You may add other facets of prosperity if they work for you, but in my opinion these four facets are easy to remember and already cover practically everything.

To put this concept into practice, what I do is ensuring that I do something to improve each facet everyday. Here is how I do it:

1. Decide on something to do daily in each facet

To keep things simple, choose only one or two tasks to do daily in each facet. More than that, it could be difficult to keep up with them. Of course, you may want to do more than just one or two tasks to improve a facet, but choose only the most important ones to be made daily. In my case, I have just one task for each facet.

One thing to remember is each of the tasks should be measurable so that you know for sure whether or not you have done it. Here is an example:

  • Material: do project for at least 2 hours
  • Spiritual: meditate for 30 minutes
  • Physical: exercise for 20 minutes
  • Social: ping at least one friend

2. Record your performance

After setting the daily tasks for each facet, all you need to do is ensuring that you do them. Recording your performance can greatly help you here. You may use a notebook, a spreadsheet, or any other medium you want. Write down there whether or not you have done a task in a particular day.

I myself use Joe’s Goals. It’s a simple web application that can help you track your progress. Whenever I finish something, I check the corresponding box in Joe’s Goals. This way I can easily see if I often miss a facet so that I can put more effort there.

3. Adjust accordingly

If you think that you can more effectively improve yourself doing something else, don’t hesitate to change the tasks. For example, maybe you think that reading spiritual text will give you better result than meditation for spiritual prosperity. In that case, you can change your daily task from meditation to reading spiritual text. On the other hand, if you think that they are both necessary, you can decide to do both (though you shouldn’t forget to keep things simple).

Another possibility is increasing the intensity of the tasks to bring you to the next level. For instance, instead of exercising for 20 minutes a day, you could make it 30 minutes a day.

***

By using this system, you can be sure that you do something everyday to improve yourself in all facets. It’s as if you make balanced progress on autopilot. I’ve used it for some time and – though I miss my daily tasks here and there – I’m glad to see how it helps me have balanced progress to complete prosperity.

What do you think? Do you have other tips for daily improvement?

Update: I change the the term financial prosperity to material prosperity to match my original post on four facets of prosperity.

Photo by Powi

11 Comments

  1. Donald,

    This is great information. I use a similar system in my GTD system, I have a daily list of tasks associated with my development. But after reading this, I am going to use your facet method to improve it. Thanks for the insights.

  2. Great tips Donald. Like Steve I have my own GTD system but th facet model is really interesting. How and when did the concept come to you?

  3. Steve,
    This is insightful for me myself. While I already have daily tasks for long time, the facet method helps me see how those tasks contribute to my prosperity. I especially like its balancing characteristic because I tended to focus on only one or two facets.

    Craig,
    I read about it last year in the book The Church in the Workplace by C. Peter Wagner. It is mentioned in only one sentence there:

    In my opinion, prosperity has four facets: material prosperity, spiritual prosperity, physical prosperity and social prosperity.

    I love its simplicity so I adopted it.

  4. Thanks for the great post and mentioning Joe’s Goals.

  5. It’s a great idea. The problem with those daily tasks is that when you forget about them for a day, you will feel guilty the next day. So how are you dealing with that? Do you try to catch up or just let it go and go on with the present day?

  6. Brad,
    You’re welcome. By the way, are you the man behind Joe’s Goals? It’s amazing!

    Hugo,
    I just let it go and go on with the present day. I use the daily tasks as guidance to better use my day, so I look at them on day-by-day basis. Sometimes I miss tasks, but that’s fine. I’ll try to do better the next day.

  7. […] A Simple Way to Improve Your Life Everyday – Donald Latumahia writes an insightful post about the four facets of prosperity, material, spiritual, physical, and social. We need balance and endless improvement in all four areas to be truly prosperous. I use a similar method as his already, but I plan to add a few facets of his plan to mine. […]

  8. Wow! I love how you have distilled your definition of success down to “the four facets of prosperity”. People have asked me how I know if I have had a good day, and being a Buddhist, I answer: “If I have reduced suffering for myself and reduced suffering for others,” but yours is better.

    I think I will be adopting the four facets as my new mantra of a successful day.

  9. […] at Life Optimizer has written a great post about how he maintains balance, which I also interpret as a way to measure success. Using the four […]

  10. Jeredb,
    Thanks for the kind words! The concept also amazed me when I first learned it.
    By the way, your answer on how to know if we have a good day is a wise one.

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