A life portfolio is a visual representation of our current activities and priorities that helps us understand where we spend our time and how that aligns to our desires. It’s focused on documenting your life in the present, not the future.

Let’s start by looking at an example Life Portfolio:

Each box represents an activity or facet of life. These facets are then grouped into sections. A Life Portfolio has two types of sections:

• Pillars
  The high-level aspects of your life. When we talk about them, we often append the term “life”, e.g. our Work Life or our Personal Life.
• Foundation
  The activities that support the pillars of your life, including required activities like eating & sleeping and optional activities like exercise & organizing.

Each box is then colored based on its importance to you personally. This Life Portfolio uses three values:

• Critical
  Facets that not only provide you with lots of value to your life, but make you happy doing them. Ideally you want to maximize your time spent here.
• Important
  Facets that provide high value to your life, but that don’t necessarily give you pleasure. Some of these may be candidates to delegate to others.
• Not Important
  Facets that provide less value in your life and aren’t hugely enjoyable. These are often candidates for removing from your life, or transitioning to a different level of commitment.

Each section has the number of hours allocated to that slice of life each week, totaling 168 hours. I’ll explain more about the hours in the next section.