Designing my life, part one

If I got sick all the time, I wouldn’t want a doctor to simply treat the symptoms; I’d want them to get to the root cause. Similarly, moving to a new town or changing jobs might improve my quality of life for a while, but until I get to the bottom of what’s missing, I’ll keep reverting to the status quo.

This past month, I’ve tried to “zoom out” and look at my life more holistically.

To guide me through this self-examination, I’m working through a book called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Bill and Dave teach design principles at Stanford University, and have since developed a popular class and book that apply these principles to how we work and live. They stress the idea that we won’t figure out how to attain the life we want by simply thinking about it; we need to build that life by mapping out different, potential futures and trying them out.

Those potential futures will be the subject of a later post. First, I needed to understand where I am now and establish some guiding principles to help me figure out where I want to go. Below I’ll share what I’ve discovered so far.

Chapter One: Start Where You Are

A car’s dashboard provides various indicators about the current state of the vehicle, such as fuel level and engine temperature. At the end of chapter one of Designing Your Life, I was prompted to create my own dashboard to see how “full” my life is in four key areas:

• Health: Although I feel like I’m doing pretty well with diet and exercise, I don’t feel replenished after I sleep and I’m often tired. As for my mental health, my mood has improved lately but I have trouble focusing. Overall, I view my health tank as 60% full.
• Work: I know there’s a lot of room for improvement in the work I do. I also find that working from home has made it harder to develop strong social connections with my colleagues, something I sorely miss. I offset some of this through my writing group and projects I’ve taken on voluntarily. I consider my work tank to be half full.
• Play: I have numerous outlets I consider “play” rather than “work”; among them traveling, trying different food and drinks, going to concerts, reading, meeting with my book club, wandering around estate sales and antique stores, and playing my new digital piano. I’d like to plan more getaways and also become more aware of upcoming, local events. Overall, I rate my play tank at 3/4 full.
• Love: My love life has improved dramatically this year. I also have a loving and supportive family and friends. I’d like to see and/or keep in touch with certain people more often, but I know at least some of that is within my control. I’ve marked my love tank 3/4 full.

Overall, with the exception of my work, my life seems closer to full than empty; but there’s room for growth in all areas.

Chapter Two: Building a Compass

Now that I have a personal dashboard to show me how I’m doing today, the next step in my life design project is to give myself a sense of direction towards a better tomorrow. At this stage, I’m not trying to define what my ideal life should look like or how I’m going to get there. First, Bill and Dave want me to tackle some bigger questions, such as:

Why am I here?

What is the purpose of life?

Why do I work?

What makes work meaningful?

Given that these are the sort of questions humans have been grappling with for millennia, I didn’t expect to come up with the perfect answers. However, with a little introspection, I found some common themes across my view of life and my view of work:

• Helping others: I believe that we can’t take anything with us when we die, so it’s pointless to live a completely self-serving existence. Instead, what matters most is the impact we have on other people’s lives and the legacy we leave behind. This could range from leading a revolution that changes the way people live to smiling at a stranger to brighten their day.
• Personal growth: I think it’s important to challenge ourselves so we can grow, not just for our own fulfillment but so that we have more to offer. The more we learn, the more wisdom we can share. The stronger we become, the more we’re able to pick others up when they fall.
• Connection: When we feel alone, we lose our sense of purpose and become trapped in the world inside our heads. In order to look outside of ourselves and feel like we’re part of something bigger, it’s important to create and foster connections with other people.

I don’t profess to uphold these ideals every moment of my life, but I believe they’re worth striving toward. And if I can understand what gives my life and work meaning, I can evaluate how well the way I spend my time supports those ideals and make adjustments to become more aligned. In other words, my view of my life and my work provides me a compass to point me towards a more well-designed life.

Chapter Three: Wayfinding

This chapter will be the subject of a future post, possibly the next one. In essence, it will give me an opportunity to dig deeper by journaling on specific activities I engage in each day and how they make me feel. Those details should give me more insight into what is and isn’t working in my life so I can make adjustments to fill up the tanks on my dashboard and navigate my way to a better life.