“Designing Your Life”: Be Intentional About How You Live

This January, I’m sharing my top book pics for a great start to the new year

“Designing Your Life” by Silicon Valley designers Bill Burnett & Dave Evans is an inspiring read that helps ensure the life you live aligns with your values and what you truly want.

Back in 2020, I actually read the authors’ second book first (“Designing Your Work Life”) which I’ll be featuring here on Medium next week.

I enjoyed the read but was hesitant to pick up their first book (“Designing Your Life”), as it’s not uncommon for books by the same authors to recycle similar ideas.

Well, I didn’t regret reading it at all — even though I ended up reading both books in the wrong order.

The premise of “Designing Your Life” is to ensure your life is heading in the direction you want. It does it by applying design thinking principles to assess various aspects of your life, such as health, work, love, and free time. Ultimately, it feels like a series of refreshing coaching sessions — wrapped up in a book.

“Designing Your Life” guides you through a series of practical exercises:

• To evaluate your life in its current state, the authors suggest filling out a dashboard with the following categories, rated from 0 to 100: “WORK,” “PLAY” (e.g., free time, hobbies, travel), “LOVE,” and “HEALTH.” This exercise alone provides a clear picture of what’s going well and what could be improved in your life right now.
• The exercise I found most impactful is building a Workview and a Lifeview. This involves honestly writing down the priorities and things that bring happiness and fulfillment in both your work and life in general. Writing them down is important because, as a second step, you compare the two to see if they align. This can reveal potential mismatches, such as when your personal values and your work environment don’t align.
• Based on this information, you can create your “life compass”, as a clearer picture of your priorities. This compass serves as a guide to help you stay aligned with your values, and it’s important to adjust it regularly — whether every year or amid significant life events — as life happens and nothing is ever set in stone.
• Based on the outcome of these exercises, you’re encouraged to plan out different scenarios and ideas through “prototyping” your life. For example, if your work life is currently not ideal, you can brainstorm ways to improve your situation.
• After the initial prototyping, you’ll need to commit to your chosen improvement ideas. Research shows that our brains struggle when faced with too many choices; rather than feeling satisfied, we tend to experience anxiety over “missing out” on other good options. This is why, in design thinking, it’s important to select a prototype and move forward without getting stuck dwelling on the life options you didn’t choose.

A very insightful and practical book, and you don’t need to complete all the exercises to benefit from it.

I never post book reviews without a beer recommendation. Books and beers — that’s what I do.

Today’s beer is a Belgian lambic from the renowned Lindemans brewery. This one is a peach lambic and it was so good!

When we lived in Germany, we used to visit Belgium quite often since it was so close — with obligatory Belgian beer tastings!

Now that we’re in Edinburgh, I’m lucky to still have easy access to Belgian beers. I had this lambic at The Bow Bar located right on Victoria Street. They have a wide selection of Belgian bottled beers and even Belgian beer themed weeks sometimes.