If you’ve looked at our Values Clarification, our Goal Setting process, and the Uzume App, pretty quickly you see these Life Categories everywhere. One of the most frequent questions I get is why do we need the categories for everything?
The categories reflect learnings from my career, where I spent a good part of my time designing, building and working in various types of databases. Database work is generally pretty boring, but working with them extensively teaches an important lesson - data is only interesting and actionable insofar as it’s relational with other data. In order for any meaningful data analysis to take place, you need to have a superstructure organizing it to let you know what types of data you have.
Categories are Uzume’s superstructure. By using Categories to align Values, Goals and Tasks, you can quickly and easily see areas of consonance as well as misalignment. Committing to spending your time and energy in agreement with your goals is fundamentally a function of Categories.
The Categories we’ve identified as most frequently useful are:
FAMILY | HEALTH | CAREER | FRIENDS | EXPERIENCES | HOME | LOVE | FINANCES | SPIRITUAL | SELF-CARE
AND - the Uzume system is flexible enough to handle user defined categories, if you feel that there’s something missing from this list.
CONNECTING VALUES TO GOALS - The first time I ever did a values clarification process, I discovered an interesting disconnect between my values and my actions. During the reflection, I identified that I felt joy when I was most connected with friends, but that I was doing very little to actively ensure that those moments of connection were possible. This realization turned into a goal of scheduling a lunch with a friend once a month, with a repeating task of making the arrangements the first week of every month. After a few months of this, I felt like this worked pretty well to help me stay focused on maintaining those important relationships, and so I expanded on it to create an email and phone goal for connecting with friends who were further away. At the end of the year I was able to see how simply creating goals that aligned with my values deepened my friendships.
The Category function was critical to this process. By identifying the Life Categories that housed my happiest memories, my proudest moments, and places where I longed for growth, I was able to easily see whether or not my existing goals were in alignment, or if I needed to add something to my goals list.
IDENTIFYING GOALS THAT DON’T ALIGN WITH YOUR VALUES - During one of my scheduled lunches that year, a friend of mine told me about a health goal she had that she was struggling with. She wanted to train for this race that she had signed up for - it would be her first half-marathon - but she was overwhelmed with family and career demands and was skipping out on her training. It was causing her anxiety to have this race deadline slowly approaching knowing that she was already behind on her training.
She was someone who I had always seen as ambitious and organized and so I got curious about why she was struggling so much with this specific goal. I started asking values questions with the Categories in mind. Did she sign up for the race because she enjoyed running and felt a lot of joy around being in good health? Was it that she had done a 10K and was super proud of that and this was the next logical step in her Experiences bucket? Did she feel like she needed to really improve her physical health? The answer to all of the above was no.
As it happened, she had set the race goal not based on a felt need or an experience of joy, but because other women in her office were running races. It seemed like the thing to do within her peer network and gave her easy conversation over lunch or coffee with colleagues. Running this race was not out of line with her values, but it wasn’t really a reflection of where she wanted to focus her energy at that moment either. As such it was easy for her to redirect her training time to the areas she really did want to focus on. She decided after that lunch to let go of the race goal until a more opportune time.
We are social creatures, and as such we absorb messages and meaning from those around us. Peer pressure is not necessarily a bad thing! But only we can identify whether or not the desire we feel to mirror those around us genuinely reflects our personal values. Categories enable us to see more clearly where our goals are received from others versus where they are organic to our lived experiences.
CONNECTING VALUES AND TASKS - Values govern our big decisions, but tasks are how we spend our time. By connecting values and tasks through the mechanism of Categories, we can easily analyze whether or not we’re spending our time on the things that mean the most to us.
Of course it’s not possible to perfectly align time and values. I remember very early on, watching a life coach talking about exactly this. (I wish I could remember who this was - if anyone knows, please drop me a line.) He was speaking from a religious perspective to a religious audience, so everyone in that group shared a commitment to their spiritual live as a value. I say this just to add context to the following. He said that if you asked people to write down in order what means the most to them, many people come up with a list that looks like this:
- God
- Family
- Health
- Career
But if you ask them where they spend their time, the list gets totally flipped on its head. His point was that for many of us, we invest more time in the things that we value less, and less time in the ones we value more.
To some degree, this is inevitable. Very few of us are afforded the luxury of investing our time exactly as we choose. Our obligations to our family and community are necessarily going to create disconnects between our time and our values. While you may not be able to perfectly align your time with your values, the categories enable you to quickly and easily see if you have values, joys, or areas for growth with few or no tasks tied to them. That is a situation you would want to see if you can change.
Tying categories to tasks doesn’t just enable you to see where you’re misaligned, it also helps you see your investments where you are aligned. For example, I have a number of values that are centered on my Family. When I look at my task list, the overwhelming number of tasks are in the Family Category. At the end of any week or during a check-in, I am able to confirm that I’ve invested my time in a high-value way. Knowing that feels wonderful, and it takes some of the more menial tasks on my list and infuses them with meaning and purpose.
If you're new to Uzume, start with our 15-minute Values Clarification, and start to see how the categories can help you set and achieve meaningful goals.
