Wheel of life

You do the wheel of life with a pen and one sheet of paper, or with the wheel further down this page. There are five steps.

1. Draw a circle and cut it into eight slices. Write one area of your life on each slice. The usual eight are in the table below.
2. Give each area a score from one to ten. Ask one question: how happy am I with this part of my life today? One means not at all, and ten means fully. Go with the first number that comes to mind.
3. Shade each slice as far as its score. A slice with a ten is full. A slice with a three is mostly empty.
4. Pick one area to work on. You do not have to pick the lowest one. Pick the low one that bothers you most.
5. Write the hours next to each score. How many hours a week does each area get? Most wheels stop before this step.

The eight areas of the wheel of life

There is no official list. Coaches usually use eight areas (The Coaching Tools Company). Swap any of them for one that fits your life better, such as your home or your faith.

Hours next to your wheel of life scores show you what to change. A score tells you how you feel about an area. The hours tell you how much of your week it really gets. You need both.

Here is an example. We made Dana up for this page. She scored her eight areas, and then she wrote down how many hours each one gets in a normal week.

Dana’s eight areas add up to 90 hours. A week has 168 hours, so the other 78 go to sleep, chores, travel and everything else. The hours on a wheel never add up to a full week, and that is fine.

A low score with few hours

Dana’s lowest area is Friends, at 3 out of 10. It gets 2 hours a week. This one is simple: it needs more time.

A low score with many hours

Work is at 5, and it already gets 46 hours. More hours will not help here. What has to change is how Dana spends those hours.

A good score with few hours

Money is at 7 with 2 hours a week. Dana can leave it alone. An area does not need many hours to be going well.

Count the hours, because a guess is often wrong

A guess of your own hours is often off. In a large US survey, workers said how many hours they usually work in a week. Then they listed one real day with its clock times. The guesses came out about three hours a week higher (Robinson and colleagues, 2011).

So start with a guess, and then count one real week. A time audit shows how, and the “where did my week go” calculator gives a quick first picture.

Your wheel of life is useful once it changes one thing in your week. Three steps do that.

Move two hours.

Take the one area you picked, and give it two more hours a week. Dana takes two hours from an evening on her phone and has dinner with a friend. Friends goes from 2 hours a week to 4.

Say when.

Give the two hours a day and a time, like Thursday at seven. The page on how to get your life together shows how to change one block of your week at a time.

Draw it again in a month.

Once a month is enough. Keep the old wheels, and look at whether the area you picked went up.

Do not aim for a ten in every area. Some areas need more of you at some times than at others. To find out which hours of your week feel good, see how to be happier.

The wheel of life is usually credited to Paul J. Meyer, who founded a company called Success Motivation Institute. Mind Tools, a training site, says the idea was first his, and that the name is a trademark of one of his companies (their page on the wheel).

The year is not known. A guide written for coaches says nobody knows when he first drew it, and that his own version had six areas, not eight.

The sources are below. We read each one for this page. Dana and her hours are our own example.

1. The Coaching Tools Company (thecoachingtoolscompany.com) (read October 13, 2026). How to Use The Wheel of Life: Complete Guide.
2. Robinson, J. P., Martin, S., Glorieux, I. and Minnen, J. (2011). The overestimated workweek revisited. Monthly Labor Review, June 2011, 43 to 53.
3. Mind Tools (mindtools.com) (read October 13, 2026). The Wheel of Life.