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 facets2 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 facet1 everyday. Here is how I do it:
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: meditate3 for 30 minutes
Physical: exercise for 20 minutes
Social: ping at least one friend
Record your performance
After setting the daily tasks for each facet, all you need to do is ensuring that you do them. Recording4 your performance can greatly help you here. You may use a notebook, a spreadsheet（电子数据表）, 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.
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 meditation5 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 .
Another possibility is increasing the intensity6 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?
