Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work

by Bill Burnett

When you become the designer of your work life, you can help your boss and your company make your job the job you want.

Dysfunctional Belief: It’s not working for me here. Reframe: You can make it work (almost) anywhere.

And yet, in poll after poll, Gallup indicates that approximately 69 percent of American workers are disengaged from their work (a percentage that includes the plain “disengaged” and the angry and resentful “actively disengaged”).

Globally, the number of workers unhappy at the place where they spend most of their lives is an astonishing 85 percent.

The Japanese even have a variety of special names for these extra miserable jobs: a shachiku worker (社) translates to “corporate livestock” or “corporate slave worker,” and kaisha no inu (会社の犬) translates as “dog of the company.” There’s even a word, karōshi (過労死), which can be translated as “death by overwork,”

Our philosophy is that YOU are the designer of your life and your job, and with design thinking, you can make it much better.

Dysfunctional Belief: I am a cog in the machine. Reframe: I am a lever that can impact the machine. Bonus Reframe: I’m a human, not a machine, and I deserve a creative and interesting job.

When designing your work life, you need to know that designers don’t think their way forward. Work designers build their way forward.

The mind-sets are: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, radical collaboration, and—the bonus—storytelling.

Be curious. Get curious, about people, work, and the world, because a designer always starts with a beginner’s mind and asks “Why?”

Try stuff. This is the bias to action step, where your curiosity and questions turn into action in the world.

Reframe problems. Reframing is a big idea, and once you get good at it, you will never get stuck again.

Know it’s a process. In design thinking, you are sometimes out generating lots and lots of ideas. We call this “phase ideation,” and it’s when you flare out, looking for all the good, bad, and crazy ideas you can find. At other times, you are focusing in on a point of view or a prototype

Ask for help. If we want to figure out how to transform our experience of work, we can’t sit at home and ruminate; we need to interact with the world of work and workers.

Tell your story. Here’s the bonus mind-set—storytelling. When you adopt the tell your story mind-set, you are always looking for opportunities to reflect on your conversations and experiences, and looking for new ways to engage the world with your story.

Telling a new story, especially to yourself, can be a powerful way to change your experience on the job.

Dysfunctional Belief: Good enough isn’t good enough, I want more. Reframe: Good enough is GREAT—for now.

We’re not discontented kids in the backseat of the family minivan, but how many of us live our lives, especially our work lives, as if we are? How often do we find ourselves waiting to get there?

The truth is, when we live our lives waiting to get somewhere, the only place we get is stuck. We have something important to say to you: Wherever you are in your work life, whatever job you are doing, it’s good enough. For now. Not forever. For now.

But let’s be real: In our society, the message from the media, from our culture, and from all around us is that enough is never enough. That nagging voice in your head, the one that compares you to everybody else, is saying that everyone else has more and I’d be happier if I had more, too.

This idea of always needing or wanting “more” can make us profoundly unhappy, and a little crazy,

Psychologists have a term for the endless seeking of more—the hedonic treadmill (hedonic = pleasure-seeking).

And each time, the high is a little less high, making the pleasure-seeker run faster on the pleasure treadmill, compulsively looking for bigger and better highs. But the problem is that you can never repeat the first “high.”

The real question isn’t: How much money, time, power, impact, meaning, status, retirement savings, [fill in the blank with your favorite thing to want more of] do you have? The real question is: How’s it going, right now?

If asked the same question, a life designer would say, “Life is good. Of course, I’m working on my gratitude and managing my Health/Work/Play/Love dashboard, and I’m always trying to make a more meaningful contribution at work, but I can honestly say that things are good and I’m pretty content with what I have. I have what I need, and that is good enough for now.”

There is plenty of evidence that much of the unhappiness in the world comes from not realizing that we have enough,

So what are the warning signs that you might be on a hedonic treadmill and going nowhere? If you find yourself sitting on your new couch, watching your big-screen TV, with your 1,000-watt super 7.1 surround-sound system blasting, and you’re feeling lonely—that’s a warning sign. If you just spent an hour retouching photos before you posted them to your social media account, trying to make your life look a little more glamorous than it really is—that’s a warning sign. And if you find yourself wandering around your local mall, wanting something but finding nothing worth owning, bored to death, and wondering how you got there and what it all means—that’s a warning sign.

Research has made it abundantly clear that one of the secrets to a happy life is to learn how to enjoy what you have.

This seventy-plus-year study found that there is no correlation between happiness and how much money you make, your social status, or other external measures of success (this assumes, of course, that you’re making a living and can sustain the basics—past that, the science says that money doesn’t matter much). What makes life meaningful and what maximizes your happiness and longevity are relationships—who you love and who loves you. And there is a strong correlation between doing something for the benefit of others and living a longer, healthier life.

Create relationships with people, not things—that’s one way to get you off the hedonic treadmill.

Ron Howard, the Stanford professor who is considered the father of decision analysis, says, “Never confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome—they are really two different things. The only thing you can control is the quality of your research and the quality of the resulting decision.” This is a critical insight about decisions and worth remembering. Of course, all Garth knew was that he was in trouble…

Here, we’d like you to try a variation on this exercise, which we call the “Good Work Journal.”

The basic principle is the same as the Good Time Journal: You observe and record your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors while at work, and then record what you notice about your work and your job. We have a few different categories of “noticing” that are connected to the research about what makes work “good work,” and they are: What did I learn? What did I initiate? Who did I help?

Practices like the Good Time Journal and the Good Work Journal help you gain awareness of what’s working in your life and what’s not.

Below is an example of a Good Work Journal. (All of our worksheets can be downloaded from our website at www.designingyourwork.life.) You make daily entries and then “notice” your answers to the following three questions:

1. What did I learn? Reflect on your day and your week and ask yourself the question What did I learn? Look for small things, something that you’ve added to all the things you know. It doesn’t have

2. What did I initiate? In order to feel like a designer in your job, you want to be creating and initiating things, most of the time. When you take it upon yourself to initiate an action, a change, or a new way of doing something, you satisfy what psychologists call an “innate need,” and these needs are uniquely human.

Who did I help? The science is clear on the value of helping others. In the Harvard Grant Study that we mentioned earlier, doing something in the service of others had a very strong correlation to long life and happiness.

Again, small interventions count. Loading the copier with paper before it runs out so that your colleagues don’t have to, watering someone’s plants when they are on vacation, helping someone solve that weird color-coding problem with their spreadsheet, bringing coffee for your colleague on the night shift, etc. All of these small gestures build good karma around the office and help satisfy an intrinsic motivation—one you might not even know you had.

Designing your life is designing your work, and designing your work is also designing your life. And we rarely give ourselves time to reflect on the totality of it all.

We recommend that you take five to ten minutes—that’s all—once a week on a non-workday, a Saturday or Sunday for most of us, and use that time for what we call our “7th Day Reflection” exercise.

There are two types of life design reflections: 1. Savoring 2. Insight By savoring we simply mean returning to an experience or thought and reentering and re-remembering it. You do this in a setting where you can give it your full attention, somewhere quiet and comfortable. You participate in the reflection at your own pace, via memory and imagination. Savoring something is inherently valuable in its own right—so a savoring reflection is about focusing on something worthwhile and giving it your honest, undistracted attention.

Don’t forget that reflection is a practice. That means that to be most effective, it ought to happen regularly. Give our 7th Day Reflection exercise a try for a couple of weeks and then take a moment to reflect on the practice itself; see how it works for you. Reflection is a powerful way to train your capacity for noticing your experience. So go for it, and welcome to “more” for free.

Designing your work life is a continual process of building your way forward. Start with a bias to action—just do something. Then adopt the “good enough for now” point of view. Try it right now. No matter what isn’t working at work, meet our challenge to do something, and accept the reframe that you could make it good enough for now. Then identify and resolve your hedonic treadmills and use the Set the Bar Low method for changing bad habits and behaviors. Adopt the practice of a daily Good Work Journal, and notice one or two positive things in your life every single day. Complete a 7th Day Reflection exercise once a week.

Try Stuff MICRO-GOAL EXERCISE 1. Pick a bad habit you’d like to change, or a new habit or behavior you’d like to make part of your daily routine (exercise more, start a mindfulness practice, have a kitchen that is always clean, etc.). 2. Set some big goals. Write down a clear and measurable description of your eventual goals. (For example: I regularly get three hours of aerobic exercise a week; I meditate thirty minutes every other day, regularly; there are never dishes in the sink and the kitchen is always clean and ready to go for the morning, before I go to bed.) 3. Make the big goals part of your “story.” Write a couple of sentences about what you’d get, what the emotional benefit to you would be, if you were to make this new behavior part of your regular routine. (For example: I’d get better health and sleep and feel good about how I look; I’d get a calm and centered approach to life and manage my anger better; I’d get an inviting place to cook and make nutritious meals for my family every day.) 4. Sneak up on the change you want to make with “micro-goals.” Plan the first eight weeks (it takes about eight weeks to establish a new normal) of micro-goals, designed to get you partway (maybe 20 percent?) toward your big goal. Make the micro-goals each week easy, something you think you’re sure you can do. And make sure that whatever goals you set, you can measure the results. 5. Make sure you reward yourself, at regular intervals, for accomplishing your micro-goals. 6. Do...

GOOD WORK JOURNAL 1. Complete a log of your daily activities, using the worksheet provided (or in your own notebook). Note when you are “Learning,” “Initiating,” and “Helping.” Try to do this daily, or at least every few days, and no less than once a week. 2. Continue this daily logging for three to four weeks. 3. At the end of each week, jot down your observations. Then ask yourself, What do I notice? 4. Are there any surprises in your observations? 5. Do you find that you have more entries in one of the three categories: learning, initiating, helping? If so, what do you think that means? 6. If you find that entries in one of the three categories are often missing, make a plan to boost your learning, initiating, or helping in the next week. 7. Observe how that intervention made you feel—make a note of that in your journal. ONE WEEK “GOOD WORK JOURNAL” WORKSHEET Use this worksheet to reflect on your day and your week and ask yourself three questions: What did I learn?, What did I initiate?, and Who did I help? Research shows that noticing these things will help you get more out of work and increase your engagement on the job. Try to have at least one entry a day.

1. Retreat • Find a quiet spot where you can sit comfortably for five to ten minutes, either at a table or with a surface you can write on (preferably by hand, but typing is okay if you prefer). • Close your eyes and just breathe for a moment. Take at least three or four full, calming breaths to slow yourself down and be glad that you’re alive and have this quiet moment to yourself. 2. Review • Now, while still keeping your eyes closed, let the last seven days flow before your mind’s eye. As you do so, look for two to four moments in your week that you are attracted to and grateful for in retrospect. • Note: Beware of being “attracted” to problems, conflicts, forgotten to-do items, etc. The mind loves to get caught up in that stuff. When that stuff appears (and it will), just tell yourself, I’ll get to that another time, and let it go. Don’t fight it or attempt to resolve it—both of which will steal all your attention. Just acknowledge it, then let it go and return to your reflection. Yes…this takes some practice to get the hang of. • As you review your week, being attentive to those two to four moments, very briefly jot down just one or two words for each such moment that stands out, so you won’t lose it. “Cheerful grocer” or “finished essay” or “appeased boss.” 3. Reflect • When you’ve got your list, look it over. • Fully savor each of those moments again—getting the most out of them. • If one particularly pulls your attention, feel free to journal a bit further about th...

Dysfunctional Belief: I must choose money or meaning because I can’t have both! Reframe: Money versus meaning (like work-life balance) is a false dichotomy. Money and meaning are just two different measurements of what I value.

So, what’s it going to be? Money or meaning? Turns out there’s no right answer, because it’s the wrong question.

There are doctors working in rural America for very little money and lots of meaning, and there are plastic surgeons doing face-lifts in Los Angeles for lots of money and very little meaning.