Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness--and a New Freedom--at Work

by Bill Burnett

Most people, even those who do not work at a “creative” job, want more creativity in their lives. So it’s a good idea to bring your inner artist to this discussion. When we went out and talked to lots of artists (and had empathy for their needs), they told us they value expression over everything else—that’s how they keep track of what they make. “I got to write and perform my play.” “I self-published my book of poetry.” “I painted a new painting that I really like.” In the artistic or “creative economy,” it is all about the value of putting your ideas, your creative output, out into the world for all to see.

Money, impact, and expression—three different ways for people to measure what they make, at work and in their lives. It’s a good way to “measure” how successful you are, and note that it is not another false dichotomy or an either/or situation. Finding your “mix” of all three maker-metrics will increase your sense of success and happiness,

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 comes down to making good choices, consistent with your compass and what you value. Many successful and happy artists, poets, and writers, who live to paint, rhyme, and write, choose to do these things on their own terms, not on the market’s. If they cared about money, the market’s measure of value, they’d have to paint what people wanted to buy (black-velvet paintings of dogs playing poker, anyone?). Or they would have to write stories that they know they could sell (click-bait stories of over-Botoxed celebrities behaving badly, anyone?). They choose not to do this. They choose to be true to their inspirations and passions, and that choice often means that they cannot monetize their art. And, since this is a conscious and coherent life design, they are okay with that, or at least more okay with that than they are with the ugly velvet-dog option.

There’s really no built-in reason you can’t have it all—money, impact, and self-expression—at least in some measure. People do it all the time—they design clever workarounds that combine their need for impact and expression with a way to make a living doing what they love, mostly. These are the people who start a local theater group or an arts-and-crafts studio in their community. These ventures are typically organized as nonprofits, inherently about impact, and provide a valuable creative service to their communities, all the while allowing the artist-founder the opportunity to do their own work and feed their need for expression. Better yet, these clever, impactful, and expressive people get to surround themselves with people who love the arts, too.

So we’ve designed a tool to help you suss out the type and scope of the impact you are having—and we called it the Impact Map. It looks like this: There are two axes on this map—one is about the “type of impact”; one is about where 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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

List four to six of the possible roles you have. And don’t forget, your job might have multiple roles. You might be a production assistant and a planner and on the corporate culture committee. So make sure that you list all the key roles that you have, and you can also list roles you had previously. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to think about the other roles you have had in the past and where they fit. And you may even think of some future roles that you’ve been imagining having. The Odyssey Planning exercise from Designing Your Life includes imagining three completely different versions of your next five years of life. If you’re doing Odyssey Planning, be sure to include some of the roles from each of your alternative ideas in your Impact Map.

After you’ve plotted your roles, the next step is to notice stuff (awareness is the first step in any change process) and ask yourself some questions: What do I notice? Are there any patterns to this data? What insights does this generate? What questions surfaced during this exercise? What am I now more curious about? Does looking over your Impact Map generate any information about the kinds of roles that were a good fit for you? Did you have a role somewhere on the map that you never liked? Or did you have another role that you didn’t think was as important, and you realize now that it was actually quite impactful? If all the jobs you disliked are in one quadrant, that’s an important thing to notice. Write down your reflections on your Impact Map.

That stuck-busting reframe really seems magical—and it makes the reframer look like the ultimate magician.

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.

Don’t add to the burden by making your problems any bigger than necessary.

He’s something of a pro at situation analysis, and over the years he’s developed a very sophisticated approach to this part of his practice. He’s boiled the process down to asking just two questions: 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. In any situation where people are stuck and stress abounds, it’s not hard to get an answer to Question number 1, and it’s exactly the right place to start. Dave would just ask it and start taking notes. After three or five or forty-five minutes of listening to the answer, Dave would move on to the really strategic part of his analysis by asking the insightfully penetrating follow-up question: Now, what’s really going on? That has been Dave’s number 2 investigative question for decades, and it works about 95 percent of the time in getting to the bottom of the real problem in very short order. In 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.

You discover that, like Bernie, there is a chance for you to get just what you want, if you just ask for what you need.

Psychologist John Gottman has made the study of human relationships, particularly marriages, his life’s work. He has videotaped more than three thousand couples in his “Love Lab” at the University of Washington, and, after coding the heart rate, facial expressions, and body language during thousands of hours of interactions, has come to a startling conclusion. 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.

“Gosh, Chandra, that sounds like a pretty complex situation you’ve got there. I can see that you’re a little discouraged because you’re just not sure if you can ever really understand the problem well enough to come up with a good solution. Is that right?” “Yes. Yes! That’s exactly right. I really don’t know how to get started, since I don’t fully understand the situation. What do I do?” “Well, I think you might be in luck. As it turns out, in your situation—as in many, many, complex situations faced by many, many people—you don’t have to understand the problem to solve it.”

It frequently turns out that many of the really hard problems in life are best treated as multiple-choice tests. You don’t really have to figure it all out—all you have to know is enough to choose.”

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). It is very tempting to want to find the BTO. That’s the option that you think you should be able to figure out; it’s the one you deserve; and it’s the one that probably doesn’t actually exist! It’s only in your head. If you really did know exactly what you wanted for dinner, then your BTO becomes a BDO, but the fact is you don’t know! (And frankly, if you did, what are the chances that there’s a Hungarian goulash place nearby that’s open at this hour?) When you’re distracted by the idea of the BTO, all the BDOs—the things you can actually do, like ordering kung pao chicken or a Philly cheesesteak sandwich—seem like a compromise. They’re all “settling,” and you don’t want to settle. But you aren’t actually settling, because an option that doesn’t exist in reality isn’t an option—it’s just an idea. Designers are all about making things—real things. 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.

Bill took an economics class when he was a freshman, and he was introduced to a concept that economists call “satisficing.” It’s a funny word, a combination of satisfy and suffice. Wikipedia defines it this way: “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.”

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. Nathaniel wants to go sailing every weekend, but he can’t afford a boat. So Nathaniel thinks his problem is: “How do I buy a boat when I have no money?” Chelsea’s start-up is maturing and has stopped growing 100 percent a year, and the company isn’t naming any new directors in the near future. Chelsea wants to be promoted to director, and so she frames her problem this way: “How do I get a director title when they aren’t promoting anyone anymore?” 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.

Chelsea has embedded one solution into her problem and is anchored. Does she really just want to get promoted, or is she bored and looking for a new challenge at work? If it’s the latter, we can draft a reframe like: “How can Chelsea find a different role in the company that will help her learn new skills and maybe grow her career in the process?”

These are both gravity problems because, in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life, and, while it might be a drag and it probably is unfair, it’s like gravity. It’s not a problem because there’s no effective action you can take, and if you can’t take action, it can’t be “solved.”

Let’s first accept that poets do not generally get paid much for writing poems. We imagine that most poets proudly belong to the starving-artist club. And we think that poetry is wonderful and important and we really need more of it in our society, but John has to accept that it is not valued much in the market economy. Expression yes, money—not so much. Okay, a moment of sadness for John and our poor poets.

Once we accept the problem, we are free to ask John what he really wants, and it’s obvious—to write poetry. That, in turn, can be reframed as having the opportunity to write poetry and perform poetry and to do as much as he can with poetry, thereby maximizing his expression, without worrying about how poetry is going to make money. So a good reframe for John might be: “I’m curious, how might I discover how poets enjoy and sustain their art while making a living doing other things?” That opens up a lot of prototyping potential. John could check out poetry slams; he could join a poetry circle (he didn’t even know that was a thing until he got curious and talked to people). John could write a poetry blog and start submitting his poems to poetry journals or, better yet, start his own poetry journal. John could practice some radical collaboration and start talking to literary agents who represent poets and authors. They could introduce John to professionally failed poets who found their way to a happy life as amateur poets. John could also reframe this poetry/money problem another way by saying, “How can I learn to live on what I’d make working only ten hours a week so I can be an almost-full-time poet?”

The Minimum Actionable Problem (MAP) Toolkit Let’s practice taking a look at our problems, a real problem in our work and/or our life, and see if we can remove the drama and cut the problem down to size. Let’s take a stab at coming up with our MAP. 1. Pick a problem that you would like to work on. It could be a problem that you are having at work, like the “feedback problem” we talked about, or even one of Gottman’s “perpetual problems” from your relationship. But make sure it’s a real problem, and one that you’ve been stuck on for a while. 2. Write the problem down, as clearly as you can. Writing it out will help you understand the “frame” that is implicit in the way you state the problem. 3. First, examine the problem for any biases, embedded solutions, drama, or emotional components. This is challenging, because we often do not see our own biases. To do this well requires radical honesty, a healthy dose of Accept, and maybe the help of a friend. 4. If you are struggling to state the problem objectively, ask a friend to help. Read them your problem statement and ask them to help you detect biases, embedded solutions, drama, or emotional components. Let them help you find a couple of MAPs. 5. Once you have a few ideas about how to reframe your problem into a MAP, put your more objective, nonbiased reframe in the form of a How might we…or a How might I… statement. 6. Once you have a few MAPed problems, brainstorm (maybe with your friend again) at least three different prot...

Best Doable Option (BDO) Exercise 1. Pick a problem that you want to work on or something that you are actually working on and would like to find a good solution to. 2. Brainstorm at least five solutions to the problem as you currently understand it. 3. Examine the options you’ve brainstormed and sort them into BTO and BDO categories 4. Now eliminate your BTOs and focus on your BDOs. Resolve to have a bias to action, pick one, and execute it. 5. Ask yourself, How do I feel? Remind yourself that, with that decision behind you, you now have more time to devote to other things. With that decision behind you (and be sure to separate the quality of the decision from the quality of the outcome), you are now free to tackle whatever is next.

If you’re reading this because you do not like your job—and know there must be a nicer, richer, handsomer job out there for you somewhere—we would be remiss if we didn’t explain that not everyone who dislikes their job actually dislikes their job. Sometimes we like what we are doing; we are just doing too much of it. We love our work but don’t like our situation, because we are dealing with task lists and inboxes that are replicating and growing and invading our lives like aliens in a science-fiction movie. We know we are getting swallowed up, and we can’t escape.

Sometimes our work problem is that we have too damn much of a good thing, and this good thing transforms into a life-sucking monster that just wants to eat our brain, turn us into strangers to our loved ones, and maybe even make us ill in the process. So sometimes we are overwhelmed by too much good stuff at work. Not always, but sometimes. We can also be overwhelmed by too much bad stuff at work. And sometimes it is a combination of the two.

Mayo Clinic defines job burnout this way: “Job burnout is a special type of work-related stress—a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” They have a ten-part questionnaire that you can use to decide if you are experiencing the symptoms of burnout. Ask yourself the following questions: Have you become cynical or overly critical at work? Do you have to drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive? Have you become irritable or impatient with coworkers, customers, or clients? Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive? Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements? Do you feel disillusioned about your job? Are you using food, drugs, or alcohol to feel better or to simply not to feel anything? Have your sleep habits or appetite changed? Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches, or other physical complaints? Answering yes to two or more of these questions might indicate that you are burned out, or well on your way. So how do we get from overwhelm to burnout? Mayo attributes it to a number of potential causes and triggers, such as: Lack of control. You are not able to influence decisions that affect your job, such as your schedule, assignments, or workload. Unclear job expectations. You’re unclear about the degree of authority you have or what your supervisor expects from you. Dysfunctional workplace dynamics. You work with an office bully, you...

Flavor one is what we like to call the “Hydra Overwhelm.” The Hydra is a nine-headed Greek monster that grew two new heads every time one was chopped off. Sound a little like your current job? Jobs that have too many parts, or too many people to report to, are often unmanageable and can lead to overwhelm. This often happens when an organization is leaned out to the point that everyone is doing two or three jobs at once. Or maybe the company is growing so fast that managers are managing more tasks and people than they can manage. You might have Hydra Overwhelm if: You have too many different responsibilities. You are reporting to too many managers (more than one) at the same time or are running too many client projects or side hustles concurrently. You are consolidating important data from too many different sources. You have to deliver status information and/or reports to too many people. You regularly use legacy systems that are cumbersome and poorly designed. You lack control or are micromanaged. You are working in isolation.

Flavor two is called the “Happy Overwhelm.” This is where you just have too much of a good thing and too many cool things to do, and you mistakenly volunteered to do them all. Your job is challenging but fun, the people you work with are great, and the projects you get offered are all high-impact and worth doing. You are just doing too many of them.

In Hydra Overwhelm, you want to get rid of, or get permission to drop, the too many things on your plate. Start by looking over the list of possible Hydra sources listed above to get your juices flowing, then make your own list of all the tasks you are doing. Make it objective, but list everything. Then, and this can be hard, pick one or two items on the list you can modify, work around, or even skip completely. Remember the Set the Bar Low method and pick simple changes that you can initiate yourself.