“Designing Your Work Life”: Assess Your Career Direction

This January, I’m sharing books to help you start the year right

Last week, I shared a post about the book “Designing Your Life” by Stanford’s Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

This week, I’m featuring their second book, “Designing Your Work Life”:

Following up on their first book, Burnett and Evans suggest applying the design thinking principles to review and improve one’s work life.

Some key takeaways:

• There’s nothing wrong with adopting the mentality of “it’s good enough, for now” — even if you’re in a less-than-ideal work situation that you would like to change. You’re not settling for something “bad”; instead, you’re giving yourself time and space to plan your next moves.
• “Set the bar low” for any changes you’re planning. The authors caution against making “New Year resolution-type” changes that are unlikely to be sustainable in the long-term. Instead, they suggest focusing on small, incremental improvements.
• Every job consists of the elements of “money”, “impact” and “expression”, each in varying proportions. It’s up to us to decide which should take priority — and this balance can and will shift over the course of our lives.
• Before quitting, it always makes sense to try redesigning your current role — unless you’re in a clearly toxic or abusive environment.
• We can reframe the job we’re doing (i.e., find a new perspective on our work), remodel it (make modifications to the existing role), relocate (within the reach, such as transferring within the same company) or, finally, reinvent (start a “career 2.0” with a different role and new skills).
• If you do decide to quit, take the time to quit well, without burning bridges. The book has a whole chapter with related advice.

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

The beer of the day is from my local Edinburgh brewery, Moonwake, which also happened to be my favorite brewery of 2024.

It is a Pacific Pale, easily one of my favorite beers of 2024. Flavorful and delicious, it features experimental New Zealand hops that very few breweries outside of NZ brew with! This picture makes me go to the Moonwake taproom and order it again.