What are life buckets?

This is about weighing up choices. It’s about how we spread our time and mind space across the different parts of our lives. How we factor in being parents, partners, providers and stay true to ourselves. We spent some time (and many conversations) brainstorming our main life elements that we narrowed into seven buckets, as categorized below:

1. Children

Planning for children, being pregnant, and raising children, all undoubtedly take up an enormous amount of time, energy and mindspace. We are mainly directing FGM at women who have children or want to have a family because Jodie and I both have children. Measuring the “life buckets’’ feels like an entirely different exercise with having kids vs without. Don’t forget that you can also de-prioritise this bucket if it is not relevant to you and look at the other 6 if you don’t have or aren’t planning on having kids.

We look at the long term perspective: what do we want to invest now to have our children (and us) reap the rewards for years to come? Having children is all encompassing, but if we look at the span of our lifetime (100 years?) 15–18 years to help form these special, incredible people is a relatively short window.

Despite the “Children” bucket capturing a lot of time, energy and mindspace, we strongly believe we shouldn’t ignore the other life buckets. In fact, we believe putting time into the other life buckets produces better children and a better relationship with them and with yourself.

2. Wealth

We think this bucket is the easiest to talk about (and most often talked about) because it is the most measurable. Most people’s wealth comes from a single source: a salary. The name of this bucket is deliberate: ‘wealth’ doesn’t always come from a salary. Nor is it always direct. For example the increase in value of a property because of work being done on it, etrading, or perhaps working for a start-up, a lower salary in return for options which, if the company is wildly successful, will give a large payday in the future. We want to look at how we stack up the dollars vs all the other “value adding” activities, as an individual, a partner and as part of a family. And that comes from figuring out how to measure the other buckets that aren’t as easy to measure as wealth.

3. Mental Fulfilment

Separate from the Wealth bucket, Mental Fulfilment is about what we want to achieve. How we want to use our brains, how we stretch ourselves. Maybe we take a hit in income in the short run because we’re changing careers or want to spend more time with our children. Neither of us want to stop using our brains in terms of individual learning and development yet we’re not sure we want big full-time jobs at this moment, so we need to work out what that looks like. We will look at how we measure fulfilment, learning and reaching our personal career goals. It may also be about having a big title, about the position within a company, responsibilities and/or people reporting into us. This may be attached to ego. Maybe enjoyment. We’ll explore the many different reasons and ways to use our brains and continue learning and stretching ourselves based on the time and priority we give this bucket.

4. Partner

Having a stable, supporting relationship makes a big difference in life. For some this bucket will mean making time for meeting someone new or dating. For others it may be a recognition that if both partners have jobs and young children at home there is little time left for each other. We both believe it’s important to make time for a healthy relationship. Many people agree with this statement, yet so often our habits don’t change, we let time with our partner slip away, and many of us end up passing by our partners like ships in the night. We don’t make time to step back and remember how to be a couple that has fun. A couple that bounces ideas off each other and talks about the future. It’s easy to get swamped into admin, taking kids to school/practice etc and getting through the day to day. If we want to have solid loving partnerships, we need to actually make time for each other, or to find the right person. We’ll look at how we prioritise our partners within our lives, some ways to benchmark and some ideas for staying connected in a busy life.

5. Community

Social contact with others, close relationships especially, has been proven time and time again to be one of the most important factors in happiness. In a world where time is a (very) limited resource and we are trying to balance all of our buckets we want to foster the right relationships. We’ll be looking at how we juggle our local community, parents at school, play date friends, our high school/college friends and of course extended family. We may have to be ruthless in figuring out with whom to spend time. We may have to prioritise friends differently to ensure they work for our partners and our kids. And, we feel strongly, make time for people that you want in your life that are just for you.

6. Health and fitness

Health is the new wealth. We want to feel great during the day, for many years to come. Many of us will want to be able to travel, to run after our kids and go play games as they grow older (and have excess energy to burn). We both (and likely all) know that sleep and good eating are at the centre of this for us. Taking care of our kids has made us realise how much energy and thought needs to go into “being healthy” which means us too! We want to be good examples for our kids as to what it means to take care of our bodies (for another 70+ years!). In this area we’ll be looking at how we stay well: prioritising sleep, staying active, eating well and listening to our bodies. How do we get ourselves feeling F’ing great?

7. Enjoyment

Yes you read that right. We think there should be a bucket devoted to fun. We only get one life, we can’t be practical all the time. Sometimes we need to just ‘be’. Maybe there is a hobby, a passion project or a creative outlet. Maybe it’s a short break. Maybe it’s meditating. Or reading a book. This is me time. What is something that you love doing? Something that you look forward to? We all need to break out our inner child and here is where we’ll do that.

What’s next? We’re going to delve into each bucket, the considerations you may want to make for each and how to start thinking about measuring each bucket.

We’ll provide a framework for evaluating your buckets that you can use to weigh up your choices against your priorities.