Track your life gauges: work, play, love, health
Monitor how full your "energy tanks" in four life domains are before making a major plan decision.
Why it works
Decisions made from depleted states are systematically different from decisions made from resource-rich states: low energy in a domain produces urgency bias and overweights the value of relief from the deficit. The dashboard practice creates a snapshot of actual current resource levels, ensuring that life plans respond to a balanced assessment rather than to whichever domain is currently most depleted.
How to do it
- Estimate (0–10) how full each gauge currently is: Work/vocation, Play/creativity, Love/relationships, Health/physical.
- Note the gauge that has been chronically low for three or more months — that is a structural issue, not a bad week.
- Ask which of your three plans addresses the chronically low gauge, and which ignores it.
- Rebuild any plan that optimizes one gauge while leaving another chronically empty.
Evidence
Resource depletion and ego depletion research shows that decisions made from depleted states are lower quality; assessing baseline resource levels before major decisions is a principled calibration tool from this literature. (mechanistic)
The "four gauges" framework is a practitioner tool from Designing Your Life; the specific domains are not derived from a validated psychological model.
Common mistake
Assessing gauges on an unusually bad or good week rather than taking a rolling average — snapshot measures during extremes produce plans optimized for an atypical state.
Practice this with IX Coach
7 days free, then $40/month (~$1.30/day).
More practices for Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures
- Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
- Rate each plan on confidence, interest, and coherence
Score each plan on whether you find it engaging, whether you could execute it, and whether it fits who you are.
- Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
- Audit for gravity problems blocking your plans
Identify which constraints you treat as fixed that are actually choices — and test whether they are as fixed as they feel.
- Run a small experiment before committing to Plan B or C
Design the smallest possible real-world experience that would tell you something true about a plan before you commit to it.
- Build a coherent narrative across your three plans
Find the values and themes that appear across all three plans — they are your non-negotiables.
Related concepts
- The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
Structured narrative writing for self-concordant goals and engaged living
- Purpose Anchors: Keeping Meaning Accessible Day to Day
Concrete practices for keeping your larger why present when the urgent crowds it out
- Ikigai, Honestly Explained
The real concept, the diagram caveat, and practices that surface it
- Anti-Goals: Defining Success by What You Refuse to Accept
How defining what you don’t want sharpens what you actually pursue