Key Terms

A short glossary of the vocabulary used across the site.

Framework structure

Pillar – One of the five top-level groupings: Expand Your Awareness, Look After Yourself, Connect with Others, Organise Your Life, and Create & Contribute.

Domain – A subdivision of a pillar. The Look After Yourself pillar, for example, contains the Health, Wellbeing, and Security domains. Worthwhile has 14 domains.

Life area – A specific area within a domain. Fitness, Sleep, and Nutrition are life areas within the Health domain. Worthwhile has 53 life areas. See all of them on the Life Areas page.

Bands – Five percentile-anchored bands within each life area: Awareness, Top 20%, Top 5%, Top 1%, and Top 0.1%. Reference points for where you sit, not a ladder to climb. See The Five Bands for details.

Benchmarks – Specific, observable indicators of what each band looks like in practice. They help you self-locate, but the underlying definition of a band is the percentile, not the benchmark.

Personalisation

Values – The 3-5 priorities that determine which interventions are most suitable for you within a life area. You set how much each matters to you, which re-ranks the recommendations.

Outcome-focused values – Values that describe what you want to achieve in an area. Fitness values, for example, might focus on health, performance, or appearance.

Approach-focused values – Values that describe how you prefer to work in an area. Financial planning, for example, might use ‘detailed control and tracking’ versus ‘simple, automated systems’ as values.

Dashboard – Your personalised view across all life areas, showing your highest-leverage opportunities given the values and constraints you’ve set, plus the interventions you’ve ticked off and the areas you’re actively working on. Works anonymously per-device; signing in syncs it across devices.

What to do

Interventions – Evidence-based actions and habits recommended for improving in a life area. Each intervention is scored against the values for that area and shown with its expected benefit, time cost, and money cost. See examples in the Intervention Database.

Actions – One-off tasks within an intervention: setting up a system, buying equipment, learning a skill.

Habits – Ongoing routines that maintain capability over time and form the sustainable foundation of improvement.

Tools – Specific websites, books, podcasts, companies, and services that Worthwhile has evaluated and recommends for implementing interventions. Interventions describe general approaches; tools are particular products that can help you put them into practice.

The prioritisation survey

Triage – Stage 1 of the prioritisation survey. Checks for acute issues – mental health, safety, financial distress, addiction, recent loss, active legal action – that warrant attention before broader optimisation.

Fundamentals – Stage 2. Checks six upstream areas with broad cross-domain effects: sleep, mental wellbeing, foundational finances, social connection, physical activity, and care responsibilities.

Focus area – Stage 3. Identifies a single binding life area to focus on next, based on what you value and where you currently feel constrained.

Quick wins – Separate from the band structure. High-impact, low-effort interventions that pay off across multiple domains regardless of where you currently sit. (In development.)