Feeling Stuck in Life? How to Do a Life Audit and Work Out What Needs to Change
Maybe you don’t need to change your whole life. Maybe you just need to see it more clearly first.
If you’ve been feeling stuck in life, wondering where your time goes or knowing something needs to change but not quite knowing what, a Life Audit can help you see where your time and energy are actually going… and whether they’re going towards the things that matter to you.
There are times when you know you’re unhappy with something but unable to put your finger on exactly what it is.
Nothing is necessarily falling apart, but something feels stuck. You might be doing all the things you think you are supposed to be doing and managing life reasonably well from the outside. However, you still feel tired, a little flat, maybe even restless, and increasingly aware that there are things you’d like more time or energy for.
The problem is, whenever you start thinking about what you’d like to change, you hit a wall – “There just isn’t enough time. Or I just don’t have the energy for it.”
Before making big decisions about what needs to change, I think it’s worth getting curious about the life you’re already living. Where does your time actually go? What takes your energy? What are you doing because it matters to you? What are you doing through habit, responsibility or expectations you’ve never stopped to question?
That’s what this Life Audit is designed to help you explore. In this article, you’ll explore:
How to complete a 7-day Life Audit by tracking your time in 15-minute increments
Where your time and energy are actually going, rather than where you think they’re going
What the way you spend your time might reveal about your values and priorities
The habits, responsibilities and unspoken expectations that shape your week
What gives you energy, what drains it and whether you’re using your best energy on the things that matter to you
- Whether something needs to be refined, removed, reduced, delegated, renegotiated, moved or added
- How to use what you’ve discovered to make one small, deliberate change towards what you actually want for your life.
What Is a Life Audit and Why Can It Help When You Feel Stuck?
A life audit is a short period of deliberately tracking how you spend your time and energy, then looking at what those patterns reveal about your priorities, responsibilities, habits and what might need to change.
Years ago, back when I still worked in a corporate role, I had to track what I was doing throughout the day in fifteen-minute blocks. We were amidst a merger and management needed to know where the resources were going, which projects were eating disproportionate time, what could be handed off, and what wasn’t worth the effort we were pouring into it anymore.
For some, it was an uncomfortable exercise, annoying for others , not to mention fears running rampant (think job loss, project and funding cuts on the horizon being inevitable). Knowing my job was safe, I personally found it an interesting experience. I genuinely thought I knew where my hours went, but there were pockets of time that just seemed to get away.
I’ve come back to that same basic exercise a lot over the years, just for a completely different reason – my personal life. Usually it begins with me wanting more, a thought of “I don’t know where I can fit that in” and after bouts of frustration about not being able to do it all, or let’s be honest trying to do it all and realising it’s not sustainable, it leads me to question:
Where are my time, attention and energy actually going? And, where would I actually like it to be going? And is that possible based on my reality?
That’s the whole premise of a life audit really. It isn’t a productivity hack, it’s more about holding up a mirror to your own week and noticing your relationship with the reflection you see.
Why Feeling Like You Have No Time Is Worth Investigating
Feeling like you have no time or are constantly rushed, is worth investigating because you’re not alone in that.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2024 Time Use Survey found that 36% of women and 30% of men said they always or often felt rushed or pressed for time. That’s a lot of people walking around genuinely depleted, not just being dramatic about their diaries.
Circumstances also aren’t equal. Some seasons of life come with a lot less breathing room than others, whether that’s small children, caring responsibilities, illness or a business in its early years, and a life audit isn’t meant to be another way of proving to yourself that you should somehow be fitting more in. That’s not the point of this at all.
The point is to simply understand the time you actually have, rather than the time you assume you have or the time you wish you had. It can be the reality check, the wake up call or the serious dose of self-compassion that you actually need (because sometimes life requires sacrifice).
How to Do a 7-Day Life Audit
How to do a 7-day life audit begins with a notepad or spreadsheet. Start with a day per page, six columns, broken down into 15-minute increments. You are going to track time, activity, who you are doing it for, energy before/after, why you are doing it and any other comments along the way – see example image below.
Commit to at least seven days. If that week feels unusual for whatever reason, keep going into a second week. If you are a woman, I highly recommend a month based on our hormonal changes (because not every week is the same). If you’re weighing up something bigger, a change to your work, your relationship, your business, I’d track for a month or even three, because one week won’t give you the full picture.
Writing down what you’re doing in roughly fifteen-minute increments is tedious, I know. But it’s also why this activity works because instead of relying on the vague impression that you’re “busy or exhausted all of the time,” you start seeing what your days are genuinely made up of.
It’s also important that you don’t try to improve anything while you are tracking. Don’t suddenly become the most disciplined, glowing version of yourself because you’re being observed! Let the week play out as it usually does and remember you’re simply collecting data, not sitting an exam.
What Does the Way You Spend Your Time Say About Your Values?
If I asked you to list your values off the top of your head, you’d probably rattle off something like family, health, freedom, connection, growth, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that list, but there’s another way of looking at values that I think is far more revealing, and it comes from Dr John Demartini’s work. It goes beyond what people say they value and looks more at what their actual behaviour, time and energy demonstrate.
As Demartini puts it, “your life’s demonstration speaks louder than your assumptions, hopes or idealisms.”
This means reviewing your audit and asking, what does this suggest actually matters to me? Not what should matter, but what does the evidence say?
You might find your week really is full of family, but very little of it looks like connection so much as logistics. Or health shows up on your values list but barely registers on your calendar, tucked into whatever ten minutes are left at the end of the day. Or maybe something you’d never have called a value at all keeps showing up anyway, learning, building, helping people, being outdoors.
This isn’t about catching yourself out or feeling guilty about a gap, it’s simply useful information to be curious about. Once you see the gap of what really matters to you, you can actually do something about it.
Are Unspoken Expectations Taking Up Your Time?
Once you’ve been tracking for your data for a while, have a look at the entries that don’t particularly energise you and ask yourself why you’re doing them.
Your first answer is probably going to be some version of “because I have to.” That’s fine. Keep going. Because I have to, why? Because it’s necessary? Because it’s good hygeine? Because I said yes to it once, years ago, and nobody’s ever revisited it? Because I don’t trust anyone else to do it properly? Because I think someone’s expecting it, even though we’ve never actually talked about it?
Those are all very different answers, and they point you toward different possibilities and solutions.
This is where I think a lot of what looks like a time problem is actually something else. Over years, patterns, roles and expectations settle into place without anyone consciously deciding them. You’re the one who organises Christmas. You’re the one who replies straight away. You always do school pickup. You’re the person everyone calls when something goes wrong. Nobody needs to ask anymore, because everyone, including you, already knows what happens.
The trouble is an arrangement like that can work perfectly well for those around you, but has actually stopped working for you.
So sometimes the more useful question isn’t “How do I fit this in?” It’s “Why am I doing it this way? Who would be impacted if I changed it? Is there another solution here?” And, if another person is involved: what do I need in order to have that conversation?
How to Track Your Time and Energy Together
A calendar on its own only tells you half the story. Two things can each take an hour and leave you in completely different states afterwards.
An hour of something meaningful might leave you tired but content. A ten-minute phone call might unsettle you for the rest of the afternoon but take off pressure for the next month. A small task you’ve been avoiding for weeks might only take fifteen minutes once you finally sit down to it, but it’s been sitting in the back of your mind costing you energy the whole time.
So alongside each entry, jot down whether it gave you energy, took energy, or left you fairly neutral. An up arrow, a down arrow, a sideways one works fine.
One thing to be careful of here: draining doesn’t automatically mean wrong. Some of the things that matter most to us require effort. Caring for someone, learning something difficult, exercising, building something meaningful or having an important conversation can all use a lot of energy without being things we want to remove from our lives.
So when you see a down arrow, don’t automatically ask “how do I get rid of this?” Ask another question first:
Was that energy well spent? And, what do I need if I decide to keep doing it?
There’s a difference between feeling tired because something asked something meaningful of you and feeling repeatedly depleted by something you no longer want to keep giving so much of yourself to.
I’ve written before about mapping my own ultradian cycles, those shorter-than-a-day rhythms associated with changes in things like alertness, focus and energy, often discussed in relation to roughly 90-minute cycles. That earlier experiment is really the ancestor of this one. Once you start noticing when your energy naturally lifts and when it drops, you can add a second layer to your audit that goes beyond what you’re doing, to when you’re doing it.
You might discover your sharpest, clearest hours land somewhere between eight and eleven in the morning, and that block is currently being handed straight over to emails and admin, while whatever’s left of you at eight at night is expected to write, exercise, plan or make decisions about your actual life. If that’s the case, the problem probably isn’t a lack of discipline. It’s that your best hours are going to the wrong things.
How Much Free Time Do You Need to Feel Well?
Here’s where I’d resist an easy conclusion, because it’s tempting to assume more free time is automatically better. The research doesn’t really back that up.
Marissa Sharif and her colleagues studied discretionary time and wellbeing across tens of thousands of people, and what they found looks a lot like a Goldilocks effect. Too little discretionary time was linked with more stress and lower wellbeing, which probably won’t surprise anyone reading this. But wellbeing didn’t just keep climbing the more free time people had either. Beyond a certain point in their data, it started dropping again.
Sharif summed up one side of it this way: “having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress and lower subjective well-being.”
The other side of that finding is just as interesting to me… Too much unstructured time, with nothing meaningful pulling us forward, can leave people feeling flat, aimless or a bit cut off from their own life, almost the opposite problem wearing a different face. Neither extreme is where we actually want to be.
Where that healthy medium sits is going to depend on you. Your stage of life, your temperament, your responsibilities, what currently fills your days. There’s no universal number of hours that works for everyone, and I’d be wary of anyone who tells you otherwise. Your audit isn’t trying to land you on a perfect figure. It’s helping you notice whether you’ve got enough room to actually participate in your life, rather than just survive it or disappear into unfilled time entirely.
What Is Missing From Your Life Right Now?
Once you’ve been tracking your data for a week or more, it’s easy to focus entirely on what needs to go. The draining commitments, the obligations, the never-ending admin.
But have a look at what barely shows up too.
Friendships. Movement. Creativity. Time with a partner that isn’t purely logistical. Being outside. Learning something new. Rest that’s actually restful rather than collapse. Doing genuinely nothing, on purpose.
Sometimes what’s making us miserable isn’t one dramatic thing dominating the week. It’s that a handful of small things that used to make us feel like ourselves have slowly gone missing over time, without anyone noticing they’d left.
Years ago I wrote about Dr Dan Siegel’s seven elements of a healthy mind, focus time, down time, time in, sleep, physical time, connection and play, and it’s a handy checklist to run your audit against. If two or three of those elements barely show up in your week at all, that’s usually not a coincidence.
What if you don't actually know what you want?
Sometimes the problem isn’t that you can see what is missing and can’t find time for it. It’s more that you’ve been responding to responsibilities, other people’s needs and whatever was immediately in front of you for so long that the question “What do I want?” feels strangely difficult to answer.
That’s okay. Don’t force an answer yet. Instead, use the audit to look for clues.
- What do you repeatedly linger over?
- What leaves you wishing there had been more time?
- When during the week did you feel most engaged, interested, peaceful or like yourself?
- What did you envy when you saw someone else doing it?
- What did you keep thinking about but never make room for?
- What did you love to do a child or teenager?
Sometimes desire returns as a whisper before it returns as a plan.
What Is Your Current Life Costing You?
Sometimes the audit doesn’t just show you where your time goes. It shows you that something you’ve been doing out of habit, or out of a sense that you should, isn’t actually worth what it’s costing you.
When my kids were little, I went through exactly this. I was working, and in my head, working was financially necessary, full stop. I didn’t really question it. But I sat down one day and properly worked out what it was costing me to keep working those hours. Childcare, fuel, the extra bits and pieces you spend when you’re stretched and short on time and energy, the lot. Once I took all of that off what I was actually bringing home, I was about $50 a week better off for working than I would have been if I’d dropped to part-time.
Fifty dollars. That was it.
Then I weighed that $50 against what it was actually costing me on the other side of the ledger. Time with my kids while they were little, the exhaustion of rushing and multi-tasking, the things I kept telling myself I’d get to eventually. Once I put it like that, it wasn’t really a difficult decision for me anymore. I went part-time, and we gave up some of the finer things in the budget to have that time back.
I’m not saying everyone’s numbers will go the same way, because they won’t, and plenty of people don’t have that flexibility. But I’d never have known where I stood without actually doing the sums. That really is what a life audit is. It’s just doing the sums, on time and energy as much as money, so you’re choosing with your eyes open rather than running on an assumption or old, outdated decisions
What Should You Change After a Life Audit?
Once you’ve got a decent stretch of data, you can start making decisions. I wouldn’t ask whether every single activity “lights you up,” because plenty of things in a full life won’t, and that’s fine. Before changing anything, though, I’d run what you’ve found through three more questions:
Is this actually a problem for me, or have I simply noticed it?
Is this something I have the ability to change right now?
If I change it, who or what else will be affected?
That last question matters because our lives don’t exist in isolation. Reducing work might affect income. Handing over a responsibility might require someone else to take it on. Changing how available you are might alter a relationship dynamic. None of that means you shouldn’t make the change, but it helps to make it with your eyes open.
Next, I’d work through each entry using seven options.
- Refine – this stays, but something about how I’m doing it needs to shift.
- Remove – this doesn’t need to be part of my life anymore.
- Reduce – it can stay, just with less of it.
- Delegate – this needs doing, though not necessarily by me.
- Renegotiate – this involves someone else, and the current arrangement isn’t working for me.
- Move – this matters, but I’m giving it the wrong part of my day.
- Add – something that matters to me isn’t getting enough room.
I know it’s tempting to clear space and immediately fill it back up with something “useful”, but sometimes it’s worth waiting before adding because what you’re actually short on is blank space.
Another important note is please don’t finish this exercise with a list of thirty-four things your life needs to change! It defeats the purpose – just pick one. One thing to refine, one conversation to have, one responsibility to hand off, one thing you’re putting back in. Try that first, and let the rest wait.
The Life Audit Framework: Track, Question, Understand, Refine
So let’s sum the life audit framework into four simple steps:
- Track where your time, attention and energy are actually going.
- Question who each activity is for and why you’re doing it.
- Understand what that reveals about your values, your energy patterns and the arrangements you’ve quietly fallen into.
- Refine what needs to change, whether that’s refining, removing, reducing, delegating, renegotiating, moving or adding.
What Does Living a More Aligned Life Actually Mean?
I use the word aligned carefully, because it can easily turn into another standard to live up to. A more aligned life doesn’t mean loving every part of your week. It doesn’t mean escaping responsibility or blowing up your life and starting over somewhere prettier.
It looks like your time, attention and energy having some genuine connection to what actually matters to you. To know what you need and find ways to meet those needs. The parts of you that want to create, rest, connect or explore not being indefinitely postponed. And being able to tell the difference between something you’ve consciously chosen and something you’ve simply kept doing because you’ve always done it, or you’re living an outdated decision or avoiding conflict or change.
How Do You Know If Your Life Actually Needs to Change?
Once you’ve got a week, a month or three months of this behind you, sit with everything you’ve collected and ask yourself one thing.
If my life carried on more or less like this for the next three years, how would I feel about that?
Not every week is representative, obviously. There are busy stretches, sick kids, deadlines, seasons that throw everything out. This isn’t a verdict on your whole life. It’s just a prompt.
If your honest answer is that you’re actually fairly content with what you’re seeing, that’s useful to know. Maybe you don’t need a big change at all. Maybe you just need more rest, or slightly different expectations of yourself, or a bit more of one thing you’ve noticed is missing.
If your answer is no, I don’t want the next three years to look like this, that’s useful too. Now you’ve got somewhere to start.
What If You Know What Needs to Change but Still Feel Stuck?
Sometimes a life audit points to something fairly practical. Cancel the subscription. Move the gym session. Hand the bookkeeping to someone else.
And sometimes you look at everything you’ve written down and think, I know I don’t want to keep living like this, I just don’t know how to stop.
Maybe saying no brings up more guilt than you expected. Maybe you’ve spent years being the reliable one and aren’t sure who you are without that role. Maybe the audit has confirmed something you’ve suspected for a while: you’re not entirely sure what you actually want anymore.
That’s usually the point where this stops being a paperwork exercise. The audit has done its job. It’s shown you what’s working and what’s not.
Counselling can be a good place to unpack the beliefs, values, needs, roles and fears sitting underneath your findings. Mentoring tends to help more once you already know what you want and need support turning it into decisions and action. Either way, you don’t necessarily need an entirely different life. You may just need to get a bit more deliberate about the one you have.
Key Takeaways
- A Life Audit helps you see where your time, attention and energy are actually going before deciding what needs to change.
- Feeling like you have no time doesn’t necessarily mean you’re managing life badly. Your circumstances matter, and sometimes the audit confirms that life genuinely is very full.
- Look beyond how much time an activity takes. Notice why you’re doing it, who it’s for and what it costs or gives you energetically.
- Your calendar can reveal gaps between what you say matters to you and what your current life actually makes room for.
- Habits, old roles and unspoken expectations can quietly become commitments you no longer consciously choose.
- The goal isn’t to eliminate everything difficult or draining. Ask whether the energy you’re spending feels worth spending.
- After your audit, consider what needs to be refined, removed, reduced, delegated, renegotiated, moved or added – then begin with one change rather than trying to overhaul your whole life.
Meet The Author
Amy Doyle
Amy is a Holistic Counsellor who helps her clients move from this idea that they are broken or missing pieces of their own puzzle, to owning their story, claiming back all parts of themselves and merging together as one team to allow them to rest and be in their deepest expression.
References
- Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). How Australians use their time, 2024. Australian Bureau of Statistics. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/how-australians-use-their-time/2024
- Sharif, M. A., Mogilner, C., & Hershfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(4), 933–947. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp000039
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