Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You

by Bill Burnett

Health.

How you measure your own health in these areas is your call. But once you’ve figured out how you define “health,” you need to pay attention to it. How healthy you are will factor significantly into how you assess the quality of your life when

Work.

You may or may not be getting paid for it, but this is the stuff you “do.” Assuming you’re not financially independent, you usually are getting paid for at least a portion of your “work.” Don’t for a minute reduce work only to that which you get paid for. Most people have more than one form of work at a time.

Play.

Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it. It can certainly include organized activity or competition or productive endeavors, but when those things are done “for the joy of it” they are play. When an activity is done to win, to advance, to achieve—even if it’s “fun” to do so—it’s not play. It may be a wonderful thing, but it’s still not play. The question here is what brings you joy purely in the doing.

Love.

We won’t attempt to define love (you know what you think on that, anyway), and we have no formulas for finding your one true love (there are lots of other books about that), but we do know that you have to pay attention to it.

SO—HOW’S IT GOING?

There is no appraisal or judgment we (or anyone) can make of your life in these four areas. We’ve all needed a remodel in at least one of these areas of life. The idea is to pick what to design first, and be curious about how you might design this particular area of your life. Awareness and curiosity are the design mind-sets you need to begin building your way forward.

THE HEALTH/WORK/PLAY/LOVE DASHBOARD

We are going to ask you to assess your state of health and the ways you work, play, and love.

When you think about health, we suggest you think about more than just a good checkup at the doctor’s. A well-designed life is supported by a healthy body, an engaged mind, and often, though not always, some form of spiritual practice.

there is no objective perfect balance of these different areas of health, just a subjective personal sense that either “I have enough” or “Something is missing.”

Even though perfect balance is not our goal, a look at this diagram can sometimes warn us that something is not right. Like an emergency light on your car’s dashboard, the diagram may serve as an indicator that it’s time to pull over and figure out what’s wrong.

YOUR HEALTH GAUGE

As we said, healthy to us means being well in more than just your body; you might want to take into account your mind and spirit, too.

The relative importance of each area is entirely up to you. Make a quick assessment of your health and then fill in your gauge—are you a quarter full, o...

YOUR WORK GAUGE

Make a list of all the ways you “work,” and then “gauge” your working life as a whole. We are assuming that there are things on your list that you are getting paid to do. This will include your nine-to-five job, and your second job if the first isn’t enough, and any consulting or advising you do, etc. If you are a regular volunteer in any organization, figure that in, too. If you are a homemaker, like Debbie, make sure you remember that raising children, providing home-cooked meals for your family, taking care of aging parents, and doing housework are all forms of “work.”

YOUR PLAY GAUGE

Play is about activity that brings joy just for the pure sake of the doing of it. It can include organized activity or productive endeavors, but only if they are done for fun and not merit. We contend that all lives need some play, and that making sure there is some play in our day is a critical life design step. Make a quick list of how you play and then fill in your gauge

YOUR LOVE GAUGE

Our primary relationship is where we go first for love, children typically come next, and then it’s a flood of people and pets and community and anything else that is an object of affection. And it is as critical to feel loved by others as it is to love—it has to go both ways. Where is the love flowing in your life, from you and from others? Make a list, and then fill in your gauge.

SO—HOW’S IT REALLY GOING?

After a few more chapters and a few more tools and ideas, you may want to come back to this assessment and check the dashboard one more time, to see if anything has changed.

the questions remain: Are you happy right now with where your gauges stand in each of these four areas? Have you looked at them honestly? Are there areas that need action? Have you perhaps come up against one of your wicked problems? That is possible, even this early in the process. If you think you have, make sure to check first for a “gravity problem.” Ask yourself if your problem is actionable. Also, look for some expression of balance and proportionality in your dashboard—very important for design—without imagining that there is some perfect symmetry or balance between all the areas in your life.

As you begin to think like a designer, remember one important thing: it’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible. Wrap your mind around that. Designing something changes the future that is possible.

TRY STUFF HEALTH/WORK/PLAY/LOVE DASHBOARD 1. Write a few sentences about how it’s going in each of the four areas. 2. Mark where you are (0 to Full) on each gauge. 3. Ask yourself if there’s a design problem you’d like to tackle in any of these areas. 4. Now ask yourself if your “problem” is a gravity problem.

You want to hear what the person who does what you might someday want to do loves and hates about his job. You want to know what her days look like, and then you want to see if you can imagine yourself doing that job—and loving it—for months and years on end. In addition to asking people about their work and life, you will also be able to find out how they got there—their career path. Most people fail not for lack of talent but for lack of imagination. You can get a lot of this information by sitting down with someone and getting his or her story.

IDENTIFYING YOUR TEAM