Why am I even doing this?

It can be easy to get sucked into the details of our daily lives and lose sight of what motivated us to seek this degree, this job, this hobby, this insert-time-consuming-activity in the first place. There is always so much to do and not enough time to do it, and the stress and overwhelm of the details can affect our motivation and cause us to question whether this (whatever it is) is worth it.

I've extolled the benefits before of the monthly review to help keep the deadlines and minutia from controlling our actions, but sometimes we require a deeper investigation. Sometimes the question is not are my routines and systems working? but am I doing this for the right reasons? or even am I in the right career?

The famously overused quote (attributed to Socrates) the unexamined life is not worth living may sound dramatic, but there is much wisdom in this idea of self-examination. It can be easy to let life's demands pull you along a path until you no longer know where you are or how to get back. And this is not to say that the path itself is easy -- in fact, the harder the work, the greater the stress, the more likely it is that you will lose the forest for the trees, as they say. Intense focus on just surviving the expectations put in front of you can make it hard to remember why you started on this path in the first place.

This is where self assessments can come in handy, and if you're a person who resists labels don't stop reading just yet. I could write paragraphs on why things like the Myers Briggs and Enneagram resonate with me, but those are not the assessments I'm talking about here.

What are your values?

Studies have shown that writing about what you value can help you perform better on exams and other high-pressure performance situations. But it's more than just a quick productivity hack. Knowing what you value is essential to guiding your career and your life choices. It can help you identify if you're in the wrong place, or it can help you focus your energy on the parts of your job that truly motivate you.

Values assessments are easy to do. You can find a list of values online, write each on an index card, and then sort through the cards, making smaller and smaller piles until you have selected just six. That's right, you have to choose only six values that are the most important to you. It is this process of choosing that makes you think really hard about what matters the most. Hard decisions can reveal your true values, your true motivations.

If you don't feel like creating a stack of index cards, there are online values assessments as well. One that I've used before and found helpful can be found here.

Aligning your work with your values

Once you've selected your top values, the true work begins. This is not something I can tell you how to do. It's up to you at this point to think hard about what values you selected and to find ways to align your work (and your play and your rest) with those values. Not every moment of your life has to be peak value resonance, but you should think about how to make sure that the places you put the most of your energy are places that feel like they match your core values.

So go on. Start a journal, brainstorm in a word doc, get a blank sheet of paper you can throw away later. And just ask yourself: how do my daily choices match my values or not? And what can I do to make that fit better?

That's all for this month, but it's hardly a small task. Examining your life is a process that never ends. But this is at least a good place to start.