Create Your Life Handbook

by Celes | | Email this post

One of the key tools I found critical in my pursuit of personal growth and living a purposeful life is creating my own life handbook. What do I mean by a life handbook?

A life handbook, to put it simply, is your manual that contains anything and everything important in living your life, from your life purpose, adages, life learnings, long-term goals, short-term goals, strategies, plans, right down to your daily tasks. Just as the Bible is the guidebook that reflects the doctrine and creed of Christianity, your life handbook is your map towards living your best possible life.

The idea of having a life handbook came to me over a year ago. In 2006, I realized my life passion to help people grow before I started my corporate job. At that point, I made the decision to enter the corporate world anyway for growth purposes, but promised myself to keep in mind my passion and pursue it full-time one day.

Fast forward to a year later in 2007, and what did I have? Absolutely no progress on my passion whatsoever! And it wasn’t because I had lost interest in it. It was simply because I was so busy juggling my busy work schedule and my daily life that I had no mental energy left to think about my passion at the end of the day. This was the same for most of my Quadrant 2 goals.

Besides that, I also noticed there were a lot of valuable learnings I was getting in life and in the course of my work were either lost over time or stashed away somewhere in my latent memory. I wasn’t proactively utilizing those learnings and maximizing what I could get out of my encounters. It was not effective to constantly keep them in my conscious memory either, since it would prevent me from utilizing all of my mental capacity with the daily events in my life. While I made an effort to pen them in notebooks and documents, they were often strewn all over the place and it was a chore just trying to keep up with them.

When I troubleshooted the whole situation, I realized it was because I was lacking a central system to hold my life around. If I were to create a one single document which lay out the blueprint on how I could get the best out of life; If I were to refer to this document as my sole reference point every day, it would enable me to be much more focused and effective. A lot of unnecessary rework I had been experiencing would be cut away. This would be the only place where I document everything that is noteworthy and it would serve as the guide for my everyday thinking, decisions, actions to be the best I can be.

Benefits Of Creating Your Life Handbook

A life handbook is incredibly powerful in many ways. First and foremost, having this document is your key enabler to becoming a true leader of your life. It is where you get reminded of your life purpose/vision, your adages and all your goals so you can continuously steer in the right direction. Having this level of clarity gives you instant focus, helps you take command of your life and ignore everything else that do not matter.

Secondly, it grants you increased mental resources. Think of your brain as a mental hard drive that has only 10meg of memory. Because this 10meg of mental space is so limited and precious, you want to use it wholly for the task you are working on at any point in time (and become more productive in the process), rather than using it to store information you don’t need currently. A life handbook is like an external, unlimited hard drive where you dump every thing that you can ever possibly need so you can refer it to the future vs storing it in your mind.

Thirdly, it makes you highly organized. There are a lot of different things we have to juggle with everyday – from pursuing our goals, tackling obstacles that surface, managing across different long-term and short-term priorities, to doing our day-to-day tasks. All these makes it very easy to get into disarray. In a bid to become more organized, you may start using post-it notes, create to-do lists, buy personal organizers, etc. However, over time, just trying to keep up with these lists becomes a task in itself to upkeep, which defeats the whole purpose of using them to begin with! A life handbook, on the other hand, keeps you highly organized as it serves as the singular one central medium where you store the information you need.

Fourthly, it makes you much more effective. Have you ever found yourself looping in certain behaviors which prevent you from moving forward? Do you ever feel you seem to be stuck in situations even though you have encountered similar ones before? In your life handbook, you document learnings you gained from your experiences, so that you can always reference back to make better decisions in the future. This allows you to move forward in becoming the best person you can be rather than repeat your footsteps from the past.

How to Create Your Life Handbook

There is no hard and fast rule on how a life handbook should be; it is up to your personal jurisdiction on how you want it to be like. It can be in the form of a book, a personal organizer, a soft copy, an online document, etc. I find creating digital softcopies via processing softwares much more effective since 1) You can easily edit the information 2) It has in-built functions to organize information readily 3) It is transferable across different mediums. My personal recommendations will be a word document or spread sheet due to their information processing capabilities.

When creating your life handbook, bear in mind that this is just like your life’s blueprint. It should contain anything and everything that is important to live your best life. Below is a good starting point on what you should put:

1. Your life purpose/vision
2. What defines you as a person; Your strengths and improvement areas
3. Your life adages
4. Your goals

While the above may seem a bit hefty and overwhelming, there is no need for you to finish writing everything in one sitting; neither is it logical to expect that. You will find that simply writing out this document requires a high degree of self awareness and clarity on your life. Take as much time as you need to introspect upon the areas above. The handbook will always remain as a work-in-progress document. There will never be a point when it is ‘finished’, since you are constantly updating it as you live through life, get new learnings, achieve your goals and aim for higher grounds. Make it a daily habit to update your handbook every day, even if it is just 5 minutes each time.

I first started working on my life handbook in early 2008, in an excel sheet. When I wasn’t busy working, I would be laying out its bricks, chipping in little bits everyday and working on it for longer periods over the weekends. It was about a couple of months before I finally felt the basic foundation of the document was in place. 1 year later today, my handbook has become a massive workbook with nearly 20 sheets chocked full of wisdom, learnings and information paramount to me and my life. Below is an outline of my handbook:

1. My overall life purpose/vision
2. My life-long goals
3. My values and overall life adages based on what I have learnt
4. My strengths; My improvement areas and blind spots
5. List of things that motivates me in life
6. My long-term and short-term goals
7. My strategies, plans and tracking for those goals
8. Inspirational quotes
9. Miscellaneous information which I access frequently: My finances, my credit card info, grocery lists, etc

Your handbook should be organized in a manner that is meaningful to you and effective for your perusal. It should be a document that motivates you and keeps you going everyday. It should keep you focused on what’s important for you. Feel free to decorate it with photographs, images, graphics, and the like. I include a lot of relevant visuals for my most important goals. For example, for my healthy living goal, I have visuals of fruits, nuts, fruit/vegetable smoothies, salads and water.

Because this book is so important, remember to keep at least one backup of it. I have a copy on my computer which I access on a daily basis and a backed up copy in an external harddrive.

After Creating Your Life Handbook

After you have created your handbook, start using it as the central repository for every single piece of information that is valuable to you. Whenever you come across something that is meaningful and noteworthy, incorporate that into your book. Whenever you have a new goal, include it inside. Whenever you get an ‘AHA!’, revelation or epiphany, capture it so it will not get lost. While you might find some getting used to in the beginning, in no time you will become naturally inclined to refer to your handbook every time.

With your handbook in place, develop the habit to start off your day by reading it. Start off with your purpose, followed by adages in life, your long-term goals then your short-term goals. You will find that even just spending a few minutes looking through it everyday will give you immense focus and clarity throughout the day which will lead to dramatic changes in the long-run.

Filed in: Awareness & Growth, Goals & Success, Motivation & Inspiration, Productivity | Posted on Mar 15 2009