Every Time Block you create belongs to one of four Pillars: Work, Life, Health, or Sleep. Pillars are the highest-level lens Existence gives you for understanding your time, the layer underneath everything else you customize and track.
What Pillars are
Pillars are fixed. You get four: Work, Life, Health, and Sleep.
You can recolor them in Settings to make your calendar easier to scan at a glance, but, with Pillars, you can't rename them, delete them, or add new ones.
Any Time Block without a Pillar assigned falls into a fifth, virtual category called Uncategorized. It isn't a real Pillar, it's a flag that shows you where you haven't been intentional yet about how a block counts.
Why four, and why fixed
Existence exists because everything you are is time, and everything you do is time but most people only account for the time that feels important.
Pillars stay fixed instead of becoming another custom tag because they're built to answer one specific question honestly, every week, for every user: how is my time actually split across the handful of things that make up a life? If Pillars could be renamed or added to, that answer would not be consistent, and your own record would lose the ability to compare against itself over time.
Activities, Places, and People are where you get to go granular and customize. Pillars stay constant so they can do their real job, give you a stable, ever-present measure of how you're actually spending your time.
How to think about Work, Life, and Health
Most Time Blocks are easy calls. A client meeting is Work. A morning run is Health. Dinner with friends is Life. Where it gets interesting, and where a lot of the insight lives, is in the blocks that could plausibly go either way.
Ultimately, you are able to to label your Time Block a different Pillar then the one it was assigned. The best way to approach it is to consider the primary purpose of that event. You may not know the answer until after the time has been lived.
It is important that you remain consistent in how you assign Pillars to your Time Blocks.
Your commute to work, golf round with a client, errands that include picking up medicine. Each user may look at this time lived differently.
Consistency keeps the Insights and patterns that Existence provides reliable and consistent month over month, year over year.
Setting Your Existence Pillar Intention
Your Pillar Intention is the foundation for your weekly alignment score.
For new users the default Pillar Intent is:
40h Work
56h Sleep
4h Health
68h Life
You can always change this by clicking on the profile icon in the top right corner, then Settings and Personalize.