Life Checklist

What is the Life Checklist?

The Life Checklist is a long list of experiences that people commonly consider part of a full life, and you tick off the ones you have actually done. At the end you get a percentage. It is a bucket list read backwards: instead of writing down what you want to do, you find out how much of it you have already got round to.

The interesting part is usually not the number. It is noticing which categories you are strong in and which you have barely touched. People who travel constantly often score close to zero on the domestic and creative items, and people with deep roots in one place frequently score higher overall than they expect.

How it works

1. Work through the list and tick anything you have done.
2. Your percentage updates as you go.
3. Nothing is submitted anywhere. It stays in your browser.

Why the number is lower than you think

Almost everyone guesses high before they start. There are two reasons. The first is that memorable experiences are easy to recall and unmemorable gaps are not, so your mental estimate is built from your highlights. The second is that a list like this deliberately spans wildly different kinds of living, from travel to craft to risk to quiet domestic things, and no single life covers all of them. A score in the forties is a well-lived life, not a deficient one.

What to do with your result

• Look at the empty categories, not the total. A cluster of unticked items in one area is more informative than the percentage.
• Separate never wanted to from never got round to. Half the unticked items usually turn out to be things you have no interest in, and that is a perfectly good answer.
• Pick one. The list is more useful as a prompt for the next twelve months than as a scoreboard for the last thirty years.
• Compare with someone. Doing it alongside a partner or a friend tends to surface things neither of you knew about the other.

A note on lists like this

Any bucket list carries assumptions about what a full life looks like, and most of them lean toward travel, novelty and things that cost money. Raising a child, caring for a parent, keeping a friendship alive for thirty years and building a skill slowly are all harder to reduce to a checkbox, and they are not less significant for it. Treat the score as a conversation starter rather than a verdict. Your progress is saved only in your browser and no account is required.