The five areas: how Atlas models a life

Every productivity system that survives long enough has an opinionated model of the world baked into it. GTD has contexts. PARA has projects-areas-resources-archives. Atlas has the five areas.

The five: Health, Wealth, Relationships, Growth, Lifestyle. They're MECE — mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive — meaning every metric and every goal you'd plausibly care about belongs to exactly one of them.

MECE matters more than it looks. Without it, you end up with metrics that live in three places, sub-areas that overlap, and a Life Score that double-counts. With it, navigation is obvious and aggregation is correct.

The interesting boundary cases: a daily run is Health (cardiovascular fitness), not Lifestyle (hobby). Reading a finance book is Growth (skill acquisition), not Wealth (the money itself). Hosting a dinner party is Relationships, even though there's a budget.