Designing Your Life (2016), Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

The authors, both from Stanford, apply design thinking techniques to planning your own life.

They draw a distinction between engineering problems, which have a specific desired outcome and lots of data, and design problems, where what you’re working towards is a problem in itself.

There’s a difference between design problems and engineering problems. […] engineering is a good approach to solving a problem when you can get a great deal of data and you’re sure there is one best solution. (5.2%)

Related: Experiment, measure and iterate rapidly to validate ideas

Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward… It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process. (9.7%)

Most people don’t have one thing they are passionate about, so this process is not about simply following your passion.

most people are passionate about many different things, and only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them… You don’t need to know your passion in order to design a life you love. (11.2%)

Finding the right problem is essential. E.g. some people will stick with a career path that they decided was good for them, trying to figure out how to succeed within that, whilst ignore evidence that it isn’t right for them.

people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed—we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy. (14.9%)

Gravity problems - problems which you cannot solve for and need to accept, such as the effect of gravity. Other examples might include lamenting that being an artist does not pay much or that being out of the workforce for a few years can make you difficult to hire.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. (17.1%)

Workview - what work is and what it means to you, a general statement of your view of work and what good work deserves to be. A work manifesto. Not what work but why you work. Can and will change over time. Questions such as:

Lifeview - defining values and perspectives that inform your understanding of life. What matters most to you. Questions such as:

The combination of the Workview and Life view give “True North” to help you keep on course. Revisit them when going through any kind of life change, or at least once a year.

Wayfinding - figuring out where you’re going when you don’t know your destination.

Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you. P98

Life design is about helping you get more out of your current life by making some improvements, not necessarily changing it completely.

Good Time Journal - logging how your job makes you feel to enable better self-reflection. For each item you add to the activity log, rate the engagement and the energy it gives you (or takes away). The examples look like a semi-circle where you can draw an arrow at the level. Be specific about what the activity is to get the best results. Can also be done retrospectively about past events.

two elements to the Good Time Journal:

Your job is to drill down into the particulars of your day and catch yourself in the act of having a good time.
(30.2%)

AEIOU method of observation:
Activities
Environments
Interactions
Objects
Users (people)

Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Having lots of good ideas to choose from can help us choose better.

Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence. (37.2%)

Anchor problems - a problem we get anchored on and have trouble moving on from. Better to become unanchored by reframing the solution and doing to some prototypes to come at it from a different angle.

Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.
(41.3%)

Prototyping reduces risk and helps you learn and iterate
Experiment, measure and iterate rapidly to validate ideas

The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they’re supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.
(41.3%)

Mind mapping with the Good TimeJournal P153
(I’ll have to come back and do these later). Pick these from your Good Time Journal and make it the centre of your mind map, create connected word and concepts working outwards. The idea is to generate a lot of ideas, without thinking too hard.

  1. Engagement - a strong area of interest, or a really engaging activity (e.g a mentoring session)
  2. Energy - something that really energises you in work and life (e.g. an art class)
  3. Flow - an experience when you were in a state of flow (e.g. doing a UI design)

Choose 3 different items from a mind map and try to combine those into a possible job description that would be fun and interesting (does not have to be practical). Name the role and do a sketch of it. Repeat for each mind map. Likely these ideas will be a bit silly.

Odyssey Plans
Map out 3 possible lives for the next 5 years (not necessarily with the job descriptions above). Each should be very different to the others. This will help open your mind to possibilities, even if you end up with the one you assumed you would.

If your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. (45.5%)

Some ideas for this:

P169
Each must include:

You are not so much finding answers in this exercise as learning to embrace and explore the questions, and be curious about the possibilities. (50.6%)

Prototyping is a way to explore and experience possibilities rapidly before overinvesting before having any data.

Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we'd like to try out. (53.2%)

The simplest prototype in life design is a Life Design Interview, in which you have a conversation with someone doing the thing you want to do and hear what their day-to-day looks like, how they feel about it, and what their path was.

Log your failures as part of becoming better at reframing them. Different types of failures:

Don't stress too much about failures, use the learnings to keep building forward (where it makes sense) or let it go.

Designers don't agonize. They don't dream about what could have been. They don't spin their wheels. And they don't waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness. (77.6%)

Much of our greatest learning comes from a failed prototype, because then we know what to build differently next time (83.5%)

On mentors:

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way. Good mentors spend most of their time listening, then offering possible reframings of your situation that allow you to have new ideas and come up with the answers that will work for you. (87.6%)

The end result of a well-designed life is a life well lived. (96.1%)