Work gets your best hours.What gets the rest?

What is a wheel of life?

A wheel of life is a simple coaching exercise. You split your life into areas, give each one a score from 1 to 10, and plot the scores as spokes on a circle. High, even scores make a round wheel. One low area gives it a flat side, and the ride gets bumpy.

Coaches use the wheel at the start of the work to decide where to look first. Plenty of people use it on their own to take stock. It earns its place because it puts your whole life on one page, where work, money, health and the people you love sit side by side.

How the Whole Life Wheel differs

Most wheels ask one question per area: how satisfied are you? The Whole Life Wheel asks two. You score each area as it is today, then where you want it to be. The distance between those two numbers is your gap. A 5 for Money that you’re content with tells you less than a 6 for Health that you want at 9.

Partner, Family and Friendship each get their own spoke, so the wheel can show which relationship gets your time and which gets what’s left. Purpose and Rest get a spoke too. A full diary can hide an empty week.

When you finish, you get five things.

• Your wheel shape. Your scores fall into one of eight shapes, and each one comes with what's working, what to watch for and a question to ask yourself.
• Your two biggest gaps, by name. They're the two areas furthest from where you want them. If two areas tie, the one that scores lower today comes first.
• A note on each gap: what often sits behind a gap in that area. Where published survey data exists, a short research note gives the picture for Singapore or across OECD countries. Read those notes as indicative, since they come from other surveys on other scales.
• Your wheel in numbers. Your wheel score is the average of your eight scores today. You also see how many areas sit high, in the middle and low, and the spread from your strongest area to your weakest.
• Moves for this week. You get one move for each gap, and a plan you can add to your calendar, with a reminder on day 7 to rescore your first gap.

The eight areas

You score each area twice, from 1 to 10. Here is what each one asks about.

Work and leadership

What you do, how you lead, and whether the work still suits you.

Money

What you earn, what you save, and how much money worries you.

Health and energy

Your sleep, fitness, food and energy.

Partner

Your closest relationship. No partner right now? Rate how you feel about that.

Family

Children, parents, brothers and sisters: the people who count on you at home.

Friendship

Friends you could call at 2am, and how often you see them.

Purpose and values

Whether the way you spend your days matches what matters most to you.

Rest and play

Time off that recharges you, and things you do just for fun.

How to read your result

Start with the gaps, then the scores. A low score you’re content with is a choice you’ve made. A low score you want higher is where your attention will go anyway, so give it a plan.

A balanced wheel can sit well short of ten. Every area at 7, each one where you want it, describes a settled life.

Then look at how the areas pull on each other. When one area scores high and two or three sit well below it, ask what the strong one is costing. The hours that keep work at 8 often come out of rest and health first.

Pick one gap and one move, and give it a week. People who write down when and what they will do follow through more often.

The Whole Life Wheel is a reflection tool for choosing where to look. It has not been validated as a psychological test, and it diagnoses nothing. If low energy has come with low mood for a while, a doctor is the right first call.

When to score it again

After a week, rescore your first gap on its own. The calendar plan carries a reminder on day 7. One point up means the move is working.

After about 90 days, score the whole wheel again. The movement between two wheels tells you more than any single score. Score it on the same browser at least two weeks after your last full wheel and your result shows a Wheel in Motion badge with what moved.

And score it whenever life changes shape: a new role, a move, a new child, a loss.

The Whole Life Wheel was built by Paul Prathap, an ICF PCC leadership coach in Singapore and the founder of Men-Kind.