Define your life roles

Life roles are the relationships and responsibilities you carry — parent, partner, the person at work, friend, and yourself. Stephen Covey made them the base of planning in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: instead of one long task list, you plan each week role by role, so no part of your life quietly gets nothing. Defining your roles takes an evening: list every hat you wear, merge them down to about seven, and for each one write a sentence about who you want to be in it.

I ran my life on one task list until it nearly cost me my family. The list was full and honest — it just had no way to show that one part of my life had been getting zero for months. Roles are the fix for that, and they are the first thing Motive asks you for.

What are life roles?

A role is a part of your life where someone — including you — depends on you. It is defined by a relationship, not by a list of chores: Dad is a role, “school runs” is a task inside it. Each role has its own people, its own kind of success and its own way of falling apart when ignored.

The reason to name them is that roles do not compete fairly inside a single list. Work sends deadlines; your health never does. Your friends don’t file tickets. In one list the loudest role wins every week, and the quiet ones lose without anyone deciding they should. Split the list by role and the imbalance becomes visible while it can still be fixed.

Where the idea comes from: Stephen Covey and the 7 Habits

Roles run through three of Covey’s habits, and each uses them differently.

• Habit 2 — Begin with the end in mind. Covey asks you to imagine your own funeral and hear four people speak: someone from your family, a friend, a colleague, someone from your community. What you would want each of them to say is a description of who you want to be in that role. He then suggests writing a personal mission statement organised by roles, with goals for each.
• Habit 3 — Put first things first. The weekly planning ritual: identify your roles, choose one or two goals for each for the coming week, and schedule them before anything else. This is the “important but not urgent” work — Quadrant II — that a task list never gets to.
• Habit 7 — Sharpen the saw. Renewal — body, mind, relationships, spirit — gets its own place on the weekly plan rather than being one role among the others. Skip it and every other role slowly runs down with you.

The later book First Things First (Covey with A. Roger and Rebecca Merrill) turns this into the week-by-week practice most people know: the “big rocks” go into the jar first, and the gravel of daily errands fills the space around them. Covey also suggests keeping the list to about seven roles — more than that and you are planning a spreadsheet, not a week.

How to define your roles, step by step

1. List every hat you wore this week. Go through your calendar and messages. Write down everyone who needed something from you and every part of you that needed something from yourself.
2. Name roles after relationships, not activities. Partner, not “household”. Running the house and being a husband are different jobs: you can do the first perfectly and still fail the second.
3. Merge down to seven or fewer. “Neighbour” and “Friend” can share a role; “Employee” and “Side business” usually can’t, because they pull on the same evenings for different reasons.
4. Keep one role for yourself. Call it Me, Self or Health — this is Covey’s sharpen-the-saw. It is the one that gets dropped first and costs the most.
5. Write who you want to be in each. One or two sentences of values and principles, not tasks. “Be there as she grows” is a role statement; “pick her up on Tuesdays” is a plan for one week.
6. Expect to revise them. Roles change with life — a new job, a child, a move. Re-read them every week; rewrite them when they stop sounding like you.

Life roles examples

One person’s set, with the values behind each role and the sentence that describes it. Yours will differ — the point is the shape, not the names.

Role	Values	Who I want to be
Dad	Presence, trust, curiosity	Be actively involved in my daughter’s life and keep my promises.
Partner	Connection, teamwork, appreciation	Stay close, share everyday responsibilities, notice what the other one carries.
Work	Reliability, clarity, growth	Follow through on commitments, make expectations clear, help my team grow.
Runner	Health, consistency, enjoyment	Run regularly and actually enjoy it.
Homeowner	Care, comfort, responsibility	Look after the house and spend the family’s money thoughtfully.
Friend & Neighbor	Belonging, generosity	Stay in touch and be someone people can count on.
Me	Balance, growth, peace of mind	Sleep, learn, reflect — keep the person carrying all of the above in working order.

Notice what is not there: no “Finances” role. Money matters in several roles at once — it is a value that runs across them, not a relationship of its own.

Common mistakes when defining roles

• Too many roles. Twelve roles means twelve empty boxes every week, and the list starts to feel like a scorecard. Merge.
• Projects disguised as roles. “Kitchen renovation” ends; a role doesn’t. Put the renovation under Homeowner.
• Only the roles that already get time. If the list is just Work and Family, you have described your calendar, not your life. The roles worth writing down are the ones currently getting nothing.
• Polishing the wording. A rough sentence you read every Sunday beats a perfect mission statement you wrote once.

How roles work in Motive

Motive is built around this step — there is no way to use it without roles, and that is deliberate.

• Each role has a description where you write who you want to be in it, so the values sit next to the plan instead of in a notebook.
• Everything belongs to a role. Tasks, projects and goals all hang off one or more roles; a task inside a project inherits the project’s roles, so nothing has to be tagged twice.
• The week is planned by role. You pick a big rock or two for each role and put them on real days; the week can be filtered down to a single role when you want to see just that part of your life.
• The review looks back by role. Every role gets a row with what was planned and what got done. A role at 0/0 is right there on the screen, not lost at the bottom of a list.
• The role for yourself stays. Setting up the app, you can drop any suggested role except Me: look after everyone but yourself, and soon there is nobody left to carry the others.

Once the roles are there, the next step is to give each of them a direction: define your goals.