2 Approaches to Get Unstuck and Design a Life You Love
What prevents us from living a life we truly want to live?
An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force. - Isaac Newton (1st Law of Motion)
I think the 1st Law of Motion also explains our behavior towards change in our lives. Our modern time is very busy. It is so busy that we can get lost in the daily grind and forget to actually change our lives for the better.
We get stuck.
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| Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash |
In a recent article, I wrote about how you can assess where you are right now in your life and visualize for yourself where you actually want to go.
Once you know that, it is time to get started.
In this article, I want to share 2 approaches to how you can get unstuck!
Find your way & get unstuck
It is crucial to have a goal.
A goal serves as a compass and shows us in which direction we need to go. However, as it is in wayfinding, in life paths aren’t straight all the time. There are ups and downs, lefts and rights.
But there is no map for your life. You have to decide on the fly which short-term direction leads you to your desired long-term direction.
When finding your way, focus on what activities you enjoy. How can you assess enjoyment? I’d say there are two distinct properties:
- Engagement: Engagement describes how absorbed you are in an activity. The optimal state here is “flow”. Flow is like the state that children have in play but for adults. The psychological effects are also similar (no sense of time & high motivation).
- Energy: Activities can create energy or consume energy.
To keep track of your activities (and your engagement- & energy levels), the Stanford professors and authors of “Designing Your Life”, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, suggest that you keep a Goodtime Journal.
1. Goodtime Journaling
What is a Goodtime Journal?
It is a collection of activities you do privately or professionally with an evaluation if a particular activity has a positive or negative impact on your engagement and energy levels.
This isn’t like those journals you fill for ages. It’s more like a tool to peek into your daily activities and see how you feel about them. And yes, it is important to write your experiences down at least once per day - there should be as little time as possible between your experience and your analysis.
Why is that the case?
Well, by jotting down what makes you happy (or not so much) at the moment, you can learn from your experiencing self, as Daniel Kahneman talks about in ”Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
Create your Goodtime Journal
It is straightforward to create a Goodtime Journal. Log your daily activities (e.g. by using this template) for three weeks.
For every activity record the following:
- Engagement: How engaged have you been in the activity?
- Did you reach a state of flow?
- Energy: was the activity energy-consuming or energy-creating?
Summarize your activities once per week and do a short reflection. Are there any patterns? Which activities are particularly engaging and energizing and which ones aren’t?
Learn from your Goodtime Journal
The interesting part starts once the three weeks are over.
By now you should have a good repository of which activities you engage in frequently and how they affect your overall happiness. It is especially important to examine the activities where you experience a state of “flow”. This could be a good indicator of activities that you should engage in more in the future.
The authors of “Designing Your Life” suggest, that you analyze your activities based on the AEIOU method. It is a common method used by designers to create and optimize products. AEIOU stands for:
- Activities: What was the task content? Was it structured/unstructured? What was the role (participant/leader)?
- Environments: Our environment has a great influence on our emotional state. In a soccer stadium, you feel a certain way, in a cathedral a different way. Where were you during the activity and what emotions did that trigger?
- Interactions: What did you interact with - people or machines? Was it a new type of interaction or a familiar one? Was it formal or informal?
- Objects: What objects or devices did you interact with - iPads or smartphones, field hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported the sense of engagement?
- User: Who else was present and what role did they play in the situation making it a positive or negative experience?
With the AEIOU analysis, the picture should become even clearer, and most likely it already sparks some ideas on how to change your schedule to enrich your life with more engaging activities.
But we’ll delve deeper into ideation in the next section.
2. Mind mapping
Did you already use mind mapping?
I think the first time I’ve used mind mapping was back at school. And to be honest, I never really liked it.
However, after reading “Designing Your Life” I revisited the method with some more knowledge of how to make the most out of it. Since I really enjoy using mind mapping to enhance my thinking (even beyond Life Design).
How does mind mapping work?
- You start with a topic. Write it down in the center of a sheet of paper.
- Brainstorm about the central topic. Write down all words or phrases that come immediately to your mind. But limit yourself to a certain time (e.g. 2 minutes).
- Go through all the topics you wrote down in the previous step and do another brainstorming.
- Repeat step (3) as long as you have ideas that come easily.
A mind map could look like this:
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| Example of a mind map, Source: https://www.mindmapping.com |
Why are mind maps so powerful?
Essentially, mind maps mimic how the human brain is structured As they connect different topics together, layer by layer.
A topic on the outer layer of a mind map can be a very good idea, but one that has little to do with the original topic. Most likely, it wouldn’t have come up at all during the initial brainstorming, or you would have filtered it out immediately or even unconsciously.
This is the outstanding aspect of the mind mapping technique: It helps us to bypass our inner filter and generate many ideas.
Utilize mind mapping for Life Design
In Life Design, mind mapping is used to ideate based on those activities you identified in your Goodtime Journal as particularly engaging, energy-creating, or where you frequently experience flow.
How should you approach it?
- Identify activities in your Goodtime Journal where you were engaged, energized, and in flow.
- Choose three activities: one that you were highly engaged in, one that felt highly energizing, and another one that led you to flow.
- Create a separate mind map for all three activities.
- Finished? Look at all the outer rings of your mind maps and pick three topics/ideas that immediately jump out at you.
- Create a job title using the topics/ideas and draw a napkin sketch (a simple drawing of the idea, explaining what it is about without going into details on how it works).
So, basically, this should only take around 30 minutes.
It’s really important not to take too much time, so you can trust your intuition (fast thinking). If you take too long, your slow thinking might take over, start doubting and finding reasons why it won’t work, even before you’ve fully laid out the idea. As it is in design it is important to subdivide the ideation and evaluating step.
And what’s next?
Once you’ve finished the mind mapping task, you have three job titles with basic ideas at hand. You’ve gotten unstuck and thought of alternative paths to create a life you love.
The next step is taking action and start shaping your life. This is nothing that happens overnight - so please don’t rush to quit your job. A great technique, I’ve become very fond of to lay out an actionable plan to shape your future is to draft Odyssey Plans.
If you are interested in what Odyssey Plans are and how you can create them, stay tuned for my next article!
Thank you for reading!
This was the second part of my in-depth series exploring “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Check out the entire series here: