Designing Your Life

Key takeaways

• Treat your life as a design problem: build, test, and improve instead of waiting for clarity
• A problem you cannot change is a gravity problem, so accept it and design around it
• Track what energises you and what drains you before making any big decision
• Sketch three different five-year lives to see that there is more than one good future
• Prototype with conversations and small experiments before you commit to a change

Inside this bit

1. Your life is a design problem

   Bill Burnett and Dave Evans taught a course at Stanford that applied product design methods to the messiest product of all: your own life. Their argument is that most people approach career questions with the wrong tools.

2. Gravity problems and your compass

   The first design step is getting clear about where you actually are. The authors suggest a quick dashboard with four gauges: health, work, play, and love.

3. Follow your energy, not your ideas

   Most people decide their next move by thinking hard. The authors want you to observe instead.

4. Three five-year odyssey plans

   Here is the exercise most readers remember. Sketch three different versions of the next five years.

5. Prototype before you leap

   A designer never builds the full product first. Burnett and Evans apply this to careers.

6. Put it to work

   Start today by rating your health, work, play, and love on a simple scale and picking the one gauge that needs attention. For the next week, spend two minutes each evening writing down what energised you and what drained you.