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

by Bill Burnett

There are private-equity gurus who make tons of money, and spend a lot of that money self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, and buying things they don’t want or need to distract themselves from their meaningless lives. There are also burned-out teachers who have lost their love of teaching, and private-equity folks who love the game and find meaning in making capitalism more efficient and more effective. There is no right answer or wrong answer to the money/meaning question. It’s all about living coherently, which means living in tune with what you value. And in order to do that, you need a way to know when you are on the right track and when you are not.

You need to build your compass. (If you’ve already done this exercise from Designing Your Life, you can skip this section.)

In Designing Your Life we explained the two things you need to build your compass—a Workview and a Lifeview.

A Workview may address such questions as: • Why work? • What’s work for? • What does work mean? • How does it relate to the individual, others, society? • What defines good or worthwhile work? • What does money have to do with it? • What does experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?

A Lifeview is what helps us define what matters most. It might address these questions: • Why are we here? • What is the meaning/purpose of life? • What is the relationship between the individual and others? • Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in? • What is good? What is evil? • Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, how does this impact my life?

One good reason to have a clearly articulated Workview and a Lifeview, other than trying to live a coherent life, is so you don’t end up accidentally living someone else’s Workview or Lifeview.

In the marketplace we generally use money as the measure of what we make.

In the nonprofit world, which we will call the “making a difference economy” from now on, what people make is impact.

However, that’s not the whole story. We also find that, when people do their Workview and Lifeview and create their compass, living more creatively almost always pops up in one way or another.

Finding your “mix” of all three maker-metrics will increase your sense of success and happiness, so coming up with a good mix for you, for now, of money, impact, and expression is important.

Here they are on our Maker Mix Board. This board shows three kinds of maker outputs that we suggest you measure and manage—for the market economy, we measure the all-mighty dollar; for the making a difference economy, it’s all about impact; and in the creativity economy, we measure expression. Like our other graphic tools, the goal is to help you tease out subtleties and understand where you are today, and where you aspire to be tomorrow. You adjust the sliders intuitively and keep adjusting the mix of money, impact, and expression until it feels right.

We believe that happiness in your work life comes from paying attention, and paying attention will help you get your Maker Mix dialed in. The trouble starts when you get your mix, well, mixed up. It’s our experience that the people we meet in our workshops and in our classes are unhappy because they have confused the different ways of measuring what they make and are working against themselves. They are at cross-purposes with their own objectives.

Dysfunctional Belief: I can’t make a living as an artist, dancer, singer, painter…fill in the blank. Reframe: I know the money-versus-meaning problem is a false dichotomy, and I’m not letting the market define who I am and what I create. I decide how much money, impact, and self-expression works for me.

Of the thousands of people we’ve met who are designing their work lives, many are struggling with these three questions: Do I really fit here? Am I really in the right job/career/company? Is this really the right contribution and impact I want to make?

Impact Map. It looks like this:

that impact occurs, the “point of impact.” On our map, there are basically three different types of impact you can have in the world. One is not better or worse than another, but they are qualitatively different. • Renewing and Repairing things • Sustaining and Supporting things • Creating New-New things

If you are renewing and repairing things, you are rebuilding or fixing existing systems and work in the world. If you are sustaining and supporting things, you are involved in running the systems that run the world and making sure they run well. And if you are creating new-new things, then you are creating whole new processes or systems.

In the Impact Map on this page, we have an investment banking systems analyst who analyzes companies according to a monetary system of evaluation. She

Try Stuff Note: Before you try out these two new tools, your Maker Mix and your Impact Map, make sure you have a solid compass to guide you. You build your compass by completing a Workview and a Lifeview and examining the coherence between these two things. There is no good or bad Work- or Lifeview. As long as what you’ve written accurately reflects how you feel (be brutally honest here—this is your reality-based view of work and life, not something you aspire to), it’s a good place to start. We recommend revisiting your compass every year or so, or whenever you are contemplating a big change, like changing jobs or careers, or moving to a new city or town, or whenever you start a new chapter in your life. That’s when having an accurate compass is the most helpful. With a solid compass in hand, try these next two exercises to help you sort out the money, impact, and expression conundrum, and to help determine where in the world you are likely to feel you have the most impact.

MAKER MIX EXERCISE 1. The goal of this exercise is to come up with a subjective evaluation of how much moneymaking, impact-making, and expression-making you have in your life right now, your Maker Mix, and how you feel about it. The visualization is simple: You set up your Maker Mix Board to represent your current life mix. Notice once again that there are no right answers—there are lots of good mixes. If lots of expression and little money, or lots of money and little impact, sounds right or seems in tune, then your sliders are right where they should be. And remember, the positions of the sliders on your money/impact/expression mix board are “set” from your gut-level understanding of what is actually the “you are here” state of things. 2. Write a few sentences about how it’s going in each of the three areas: moneymaking, impact-making, and expression-making. 3. Adjust the location of each maker slider in your current situation. 4. Ask yourself how you feel about your board. 5. Now build the board you aspire to, the one that you think would represent one manageable step toward a better balance, one that would result in a more coherent life. 6. Brainstorm a couple of simple changes you’d like to make to adjust any one of your “slices.” 7. Come up with a few simple prototypes you’d like to try that move a slider a little to change the allocation of money, impact, and expression in your mix (review the Set the Bar Low method from chapter 1).

MAKER MIX WORKSHEET This graphic has sliders for three kinds of “maker outputs”—for the market economy, we will adjust Money in the mix; for the making a difference economy, we adjust Impact; and in the creativity economy, we will dial up Expression. Like our other graphic tools, the goal is to help you understand where you are today, and where you aspire to be tomorrow. You move the sliders intuitively and keep adjusting the mix of money, impact, and expression until it feels right. There are no units—just a range from 0 to 100. Now design the mix you like in the future. Are you doubling down on money to pay off those students loans—okay push that slider up. Or are you in a season of life where impact and expression are “how you want to get paid.” Whatever the mix, make it fit for you.

Now write down three things that will help you start moving in the direction of your preferred Maker Mix. Now go out and try a couple of your prototypes and then redo your Maker Mix Board. Did you successfully move one of the sliders? Did something unexpected happen? How did it “sound”? Is life easier to dance to now? Are you starting to realize that you need more expression in your life (after all, you are a creative person, aren’t you)? Are you being really clear on how important money is to you (not as much as you thought!)? And are you staying vigilant about identifying any hedonic treadmills embedded in your answers? Tip: The negative aspects of hedonic treadmills are most often associated with the accumulation of money, so be careful with that track. Check in with yourself and update this simple Maker Mix Board every once in a while, or anytime you think your life coherency might be slipping a little. It is easy to get out of tune in our hyper-busy modern work world. Socrates’s “examined life” (you know, the one worth living) requires periodic checkups—the money/impact/expression Maker Mix is another good way to answer the question “How’s it going?” MAP YOUR ROLE EXERCISE IMPACT MAP WORKSHEET List 4–6 roles (past, present, and possible future). A “job” might have several possible roles, each with a distinct place on the map. Locate the roles on the map. Reflect: What do you notice? What insights does this generate? What questions does this surface? 1. List four to si...

Dysfunctional Belief: My problems at work are insurmountable. I’m totally stuck. Reframe: I’m never totally stuck, because I know how to reframe anything into a Minimum Actionable Problem (MAP).

Figuring out which work problem is actually the problem to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make in designing your work life.

What is a reframe, anyway? It’s a do-over. A problem-framing do-over.

GET IN THE BOX: This is the “box” that people are always trying to “think outside of.” The saying “Think outside the box” sounds like there’s some way to think in a totally unconstrained and creative way, “unboxed” thinking. Not true. There’s always a box. There has to be—your brain can’t be all over the universe at once. (Contain yourself!)

Creativity is all about playing around with how you frame your box and how you “play” within that framing. Step 1: Accept that there is always a box. Step 2: Remind yourself that you made the box when you framed the question, and you can change the frame when you need new, more helpful solutions.

Minimum Actionable Problem (MAP) There are lots of problems that sound like they have no solutions.

We find that so-called insurmountable problems like Bernie’s are usually either (1) truly inactionable and therefore circumstances to accept and not actionable problems (we call these “gravity problems,” because, well, there’s nothing you can do about gravity, it just is), or (2) poorly framed problems that we can reframe to make them more actionable.

Expert Consultant Dave Question #1: What’s going on? (Then he listens to the very long answer the client gives him, he takes a thoughtful pause, and then he asks the second question.) Expert Consultant Dave Question #2: Okay. Now, what’s really going on? That’s it. Really.

most situations, there’s what psychologists like to describe as the presenting situation and then there’s the underlying situation. Question number 1 gets at the presenting situation and Question number 2 gets at the underlying situation. It’s the way to get to your new MAP. Your Minimum Actionable Problem.

Dramatic Component #2: Just a jerk Try saying, “My boss is just a jerk…” out loud, and really lean into the word just. Go ahead, do it now. Hear it? Try it again. Do you hear it—when you get to the word just? There’s a real edge there, and that means something. It strongly suggests that Bernie’s boss is all jerk, all the time. That’s tough. And it’s probably a little unfair. It is, however, reasonable to conclude that change is unlikely, and it’s probably smart not to predict some big “feedback transformation” any day soon. So, without the drama and the exaggeration, let’s call it what it is: Bernie’s boss is a poor feedback provider, unlikely to change. But that’s a far cry from the total universal disaster contained in the statement: My boss is just a jerk.

Dramatic Component #3: Never going to get any “Never—any” is the most emotional aspect of Bernie’s poorly posed problem statement. Why?

This means we have what we call an “anchor problem” here as well, since Bernie has embedded the solution he wants in the problem statement—see the description of anchor and gravity problems later in this chapter. You’ll get a great tip on reframing about half the badly framed problems out there.

going on? Now we ask the question: What is really going on? This is the critical step where you take the insights from Step 2 and reframe how you describe the problem in a way that defines your new MAP—Minimum Actionable Problem.

Here are three reframes that give Bernie a MAP that he can work on: • MAP 1: My boss rarely gives positive feedback, so how might I receive explicit appreciation for my work from someone else in my organization? • MAP 2: My boss has many qualities except being appreciative, so how might I get affirmation from other sources whom I respect? • MAP 3: The management approach at my employer does not require giving positive feedback, so how might I reframe work satisfaction as coming from my paycheck and look for personal appreciation outside the office?

In this case, when Bernie asked himself where this really strong reaction to being underappreciated was coming from, his old scoutmaster came to mind. He was an ex-Marine and loved barking orders to little people in uniform, but he sure wouldn’t know how to say “Good work!” or “Hey, nice job!” if his life depended on it. That scoutmaster’s lack of appreciation had a pretty big impact on a young, somewhat shy, twelve-year-old Bernie.

Fortunately, Dave was pretty good at reframing, even at the ripe old age of twelve. “He’s an awful tough SOB and I wish he were nicer, but I know lots of nice people. What I really need is someone to teach me how to backpack and take care of myself outdoors, and this guy sure can do that! Thanks for all that great training, Mr. Smith!”

So Bernie noticed that having some negative history with leaders who lack appreciation skills might be the reason he brought some heightened sensitivity to his company.

But that’s not spontaneous and freely given, thinks Bernie. That’s the way he likes his feedback. That’s the way Mrs. Dunleavy did it. Is it really good feedback if he has to ask for it?, he wonders. And right in that moment Bernie realized he was doing it again; he was embedding one of his preferred solutions (…spontaneously given feedback is the “good” kind) in the problem statement, and thereby ruining his chance of an actionable solution.

So it might be more accurate to say that, rather than solving a problem, we’re actually just responding to a problem and trying to get it into an acceptable new state. When we’ve attained that new and more acceptable situation, we’ve come to a resolution. The problem might not be permanently solved, but it is resolved for now, it is re-solved.

His data says that 70 percent of the problems that couples wrestle with are unsolvable. He calls these “perpetual problems.” But that is not necessarily a bad thing. His conclusion is that the couples that stay together for life, what he calls “Master Couples,” accept that many of their problems are like this and develop workarounds. They do not let these problems end up destroying their happiness. They seek a “good enough” resolution of these perpetual problems and move on.

The first step is to recognize that we’re going for an acceptable measure of resolution—not the perfect answer.

It turns out that lots of problems, even after being well reframed, are difficult if not impossible to fully understand. But in most cases you have only a finite number of viable alternatives, so you don’t need to “understand” your problem, in all its existential glory, you just need to know enough to pick from among the doable options.

The trick here is to remind yourself that you’re going for the Best Doable Option (BDO), which is not the same as the Best Theoretical Option (BTO).

We want you to real-ize your dreams, not just dream them. So formulate the list of actually available options, then pick the best one. The Best Doable Option. And don’t let worrying about the nonexistent Best Theoretical Option steal your enjoyment of your chosen BDO.

“Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic [a formula for making a decision] that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met.”

When you choose the Best Doable Option, you are actually performing a sophisticated economic analysis of your “acceptability threshold” and acting like the chairman of the Federal Reserve to promote the best possible “decision economy.”

Anchor Problems: These guys are just like a physical anchor; they hold us in place and prevent our forward motion. They keep us stuck, and, if we are going to practice good work design, it is important to notice when we are stuck with an anchor problem.

You get the idea. An anchor problem occurs because we actually define the problem as one of our preferred solutions; we embed a solution in the problem. In other words, an anchor problem isn’t really a problem at all—it’s an unnegotiable and, unfortunately for you, unavailable solution masquerading as the problem. We marry ourselves to a solution that just isn’t going to happen.