Sculpting Your Best Year Yet: A Practical 6-Step Guide to Life Design in the New Year

As the year draws to a close, it’s that special time when we pause to ponder the events of the past twelve months and envision the possibilities that lie ahead.

Yet, despite our best intentions, the journey of New Year’s resolutions often encounters a common roadblock – the dreaded drop-off. In fact, Forbes reports that over 60% of these ambitious goals find themselves abandoned within a mere three months.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Resolutions are often linked to habits and goals. But more often than not, the goals are not very actionable, such as “improve fitness,” “lose weight,” or “improve finances.” But how do we want to achieve it? What is the exact number (save X dollars, lose Y kilograms, etc.)?

Books like Atomic Habits suggest that you need to tie your goals to your identity.

But how to do that?

This year I read a great book that draws a concrete, actionable plan to shape our identity and design a life we love: Designing your Life a #1 New York Times bestseller by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

In this article I want to share the core insights of the book and what I learned from it.

The 6 Steps of “Designing your Life”

The authors, both creative minds, product engineers, and professors at Stanford, developed the “Designing Your Life” method initially as a lecture for their students. They structured it in a manner that empowered their students to craft a life and career path they love.

Leveraging their design expertise, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans incorporate techniques like reflection, journaling, and prototyping. The comprehensive method can be distilled into 6 actionable steps.

1. Create a Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard

To determine your direction, it’s essential to initially grasp your current position.

There exist a ton of methods to do that.

One is crafting your Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard.

• Work: How do you work right now? Think of all the work that you do, including employed work, studying, a side hustle, … Are you satisfied with it? What would you like to change?
• Play: These are activities that bring you enjoyment. However, everyone engages in play differently: for some, it could be music, others consider sports as play, and some like to play video games. How do you define your play? Do you have enough time for play?
• Love: This dimension is not just about romantic love, it’s also about friendship. How would you rate it right now?
• Health: Do you feel healthy? Are you stressed? Do you take the time for physical exercise?

Try to make an estimate between 0 % and 100 % how fulfilled you are within the particular category. Visualize the results; you can use a draft provided by the authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Once you filled out the dashboard, ask yourself if there are any design problems. Try to formulate the problems in a way such that they are actionable.

2. Write a Workview and a Lifeview

Once you’ve painted the picture of your current landscape, create a vision for yourself. Actually, you should create two visions: one for your work-life and another one for your life as a whole. This step boils down to 4 steps:

1. Craft a brief reflection about your view on work. Invest around 30 minutes and aim for roughly 250 words. You can use the following questions:
   1. Why do I work and what do I work for?
   2. What does work mean to me?
   3. How is work related to the individual, others and society?
   4. What is good or bad work?
   5. What does money have to do with it and what do experiences, fulfillment and growth have to do with work?
2. Craft a brief reflection about your view on life. Invest around 30 minutes and aim for roughly 250 words.
   1. Why are we here? What is the meaning or purpose of life?
   2. What is the relationship between the individual and others?
   3. Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
   4. What is good, and what is evil for me?
   5. Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on my life?
   6. What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
3. Compare the two views: Do they complement each other? Where do they clash? Does one drive the other?
4. Update them so that the two views align.

Congratulations! You’ve just crafted your personal compass. The next time a crucial decision looms, glance at your two views. Opt for the choice that aligns best with them. Your compass will guide you true!

Once you have developed your compass, make sure it stays up to date. Update it at least once a year - it only takes a few minutes.

3. Do Good Time Journaling

To craft a life you love, there are two crucial elements involved, that have a tremendous impact on your happiness: energy & engagement.

By practicing Good Time Journaling, you get a good overview of the activities that make life worthwhile - the activities that engage you and charge your energy.

Why write them down?

By jotting down what brings you joy in a moment (and what does not), you can also learn from your experiencing self (cf. “Thinking, Fast and Slow”).

How should you approach Good Time Journaling?

Log your daily activities (e.g. by using this template) for three weeks. For every activity record the following:

• Assess the level of your engagement.
• Did you reach a state of flow?
• Was the activity energy-consuming or energy-creating?

At the end of each week do a brief reflection: which activities are engaging and energizing, and which ones are not?

After the three weeks, you should have a solid grasp of how your activities impact your happiness. Where did you experience a state of “flow”? This could be a significant indicator of activities to enhance your life with.

But we’ll delve deeper into that in the next section.

4. Draw a mind map

Mind mapping serves as an excellent tool for fostering creative thinking. It mirrors the workings of our brain and has the potential to significantly enhance the ideation process.

In Life Design, mind mapping is used to identify possible alternative life paths. How do you approach it?

1. Identify activities in your Good Time Journal where you were engaged, energized, and in flow.
2. Choose three activities: one that you were highly engaged in, one that felt highly energizing and another one that led you to flow.
3. Create a mind map for all three activities.
4. Once you finished the mind maps, look on their outer rings. Pick three things that jump out at you.
5. Create a job description from them and draw a napkin sketch.

5. Create your Odyssey Plans

Now, it’s time for the next step in Life Design: crafting your Odyssey Plans.

What exactly is an Odyssey Plan?

It’s a five-year roadmap or plan where you sketch out what you aim to achieve in the upcoming years. Each plan has a title and a dashboard with four variables:

• Resources: money, skill, time, contacts, …
• Likability: Do you actually like the plan?
• Confidence: Are you confident about pulling this off?
• Coherence: Is it consistent with your Workview and your Lifeview?

Hold on a moment.

Instead of crafting just one plan, generate three alternative Odyssey Plans simultaneously - no sequential order here. This approach allows you to maximize your creative potential, just as a professional designer would approach it.

But on which topic should you draw the Odyssey Plans?

Feel free to select any topic you prefer. The only requirement is that the three plans must differ significantly from each other (they shouldn’t be merely three variations of the same plan). If you’re having trouble choosing a topic, you can consider using the three job descriptions from the previous section.

Alternatively, you can use:

1. Your current plan.
2. Plan B: if you would have to pivot your life 100 % (e.g., moving to the other side of the world, a job loss etc.).
3. Money is no constraint.

Odyssey Plan example by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

6. Do Prototyping

You now have everything you need to start creating a life you love.

But this does not mean that you should quit your job tomorrow and do a 90° pivot. Prototyping means that you should start small and iterate from there: again, just as a professional designer would do it.

Creating prototypes is not a thought experiment but something that you really (physically) must do. A first step is talking to people. Seek out individuals who are already in the role you aspire for (in your Odyssey Plans).

This is called a “prototype interview”.

Perhaps there’s someone already employed in the same company. Offer them a coffee and have a chat with them.

If there’s no one within your current organization to connect with, try exploring online or tapping into your existing network.

Initiating a conversation with someone who doesn’t know you yet can be challenging. A valuable strategy is to seek a referral from a mutual contact. This increases the likelihood of securing a conversation.

Equally important is to express genuine interest in the personal stories of the individuals you’re reaching out to. Typically, people are willing to assist, and if they can do so by sharing their own experiences, it adds another favorable factor for you.

If you managed to do a “prototype interview”, don’t treat it as a formal interview.

Instead have an informal conversation over a coffee. The aim is to get to know the other person’s story. Try to, e.g., answer the following questions:

• What does the person like about their role?
• What does the person not like about their role?
• How did they get there?

Sometimes you might have the chance to shape your current job so that it devlops in the direction you aspire for.

If that’s not feasible, conducting “prototype interviews” serves as an effective method to expand your network and establish connections in a field you are deeply passionate about. You never know, a job offer might even emerge from one of these “prototype interviews”.

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Thank you for reading!

For me personally, Life Design is an actionable method that pinpoint the activities that ignite my energy and enthusiasm and also serves as a playbook on how to amplify their impact in my life.

If you are interested in the topic and need more information about Life Design check out the full book “Designing Your Life” or the Designing Your Life webpage.