#48 x3 short excercises to design your life

There’s an old saying about waiting for a bus, then x 3 come at once:

Well, this week I’ve had x2 students + an old friend all separately ask me the same question…
They felt lost, and didn’t know what to do next.
They felt torn between several different ideas and directions.
They were trying to do them all at once.
They wanted me to tell them what to focus on.
They wanted me to tell them what to focus on.

But personally, I’m the last person I would ask this question 🤣
I’ve been the most guilty of changing the direction of my life:
As someone who’s changed career x3 times.
I spent 9 years of life on x2 separate degrees (and last week I finally found a use for them)

So I didn’t have the answer for them.
But I do have a few lifestyle design worksheets that will help THEM work out their OWN answer.
Which is far more important.

So it’s the perfect timing for this article.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this now,
but for over 10 years,
Design Hero was a side hustle
and made almost no money.

I was burned out chasing x2 directions at once,
working all hours.
Been there,
Done that.
Had the heart attack.

Scrolling through social media,
bombarded by successful freelancers posts:

”I launched my business 1 year ago, now I’m making £10k/m
Btw here’s a picture of me posing on a jet skis in Dubai 🤣”

I’d fall into compare & despair.
So I tried to throw money at the problem.
I’ve spent over £10k on coaching and courses

Some of them were great.
Most of them were garbage.
Any guru who says it’s easy to grow any business to 6 figures is lying.

Your life rarely goes the way you planned.
Most “overnight success stories” started decades ago.
Influencers cherry-pick the starting point of their success story.

And don’t get me started on the gurus:
social media is awash with surface-level advice
and empty platitudes on how to “be successful” in life.

Of course, this always relies on you conforming to their idea of what “success” looks like…
And there’s a long line of people waiting to tell you what you should do to get it.

Without clarity on where you want to go in life,
you’ll take the first direction that appears in front of you.
If you don’t have clarity on what YOU want,
you start taking someone else’s ideas…

This is when you find yourself endlessly flipflopping from one idea to the next:

One week you’ll be targeting wellbeing startups,
Then you think you want to shift to a retainer “design on demand” service,
Then you realise you don’t want to be a designer at all, you want to move into starting an ecommerce store.

I’ve seen this a million times.
Done it myself too.
It’s a permanent identity crisis with no end in sight.

Not nice.

A framework for intentional living

So what do you actually want your life to look like?

When I ask this question of freelancers in Life by Design I get responses about things.

Your life is not the money you earn,
Your life is not where you went on holiday,
Your life is not the car you own.

Your life is how you spend your time every day.

How we spend our days,
is how we spend our lives
– Annie Dillard

So this article will help you figure out how to live an intentional life well lived,
instead of taking someone else’s template for it.

These worksheets for designing your life, will help you work it out for yourself.

I don’t mean broad vague ideas,
I’m talking about sitting down and writing down what your day is going to look like,
then living it, every day,
as best you can.

Your life is such a big thing, it’s changeable intangible, it shifts.
So there’s x3 exercises I use to guide my thoughts and get instant clarity on my life.
Most people when asked about changing their life will start telling you their goals.

But goals without action are just wishful thinking.

How to live life by design

If you want to design your ideal life AND make it happen,
here’s how to do it:

Figure out what you want your life to look like

🔽

set goals for each area of your life

🔽

Turn your vague goals into an actual plan to reach your goal

🔽

break your goal into steps and habits, so you can take action instead of just thinking about it.

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plug habits into a schedule that you can work on every day

🔽

stay consistent to your schedule for weeks, months and years

I have another article which will guide you through designing your life in one day,
where I cover the broad strokes on each of these stages,
but today we’re going more in-depth on the first of those steps…

Worksheets to analyse and design your life

First a disclaimer:
I did not create any of these tools.

I’ve adapted them from exercises shared with me by other people,
who in turn adapted them from others before them.
I’ve combined them into a framework I use with my students, to analyse your life and get clarity.

These x3 tools combined are a framework to give you clarity on what you want your life to look like.
We’re going assess your life through 3 lenses:

1. Past (Experience)
2. Present (Emotional)
3. Future (Imagination)

In Systemized Solopreneurs we go through all of these together as a group.

but I’ll show you how to do them just now.

Past – Excercise to design your life through past experience

an “anti-vision for your life”

Sometimes the only way to figure out what you want,
is to identify what you don’t want,
through negative experiences.

Let’s look backwards…

1. What does an unfulfilling day look like?
2. How do you not want to feel look like and act?
3. What types of people don’t you want to spend time around?
4. How much money is too little to sustain you?
5. What can’t you do with that money?
6. Who do you not want to be like?
7. What environment would you hate to live and work in?
8. What kind of tasks do you not like doing?
9. When in your life were you least fulfilled?
10. Feel free to make your own prompts…

Example

What tasks do you not want to spend your day doing?

• busiwork
• admin
• calls
• accounting
• emails

Example

What environment would you hate to live and work in?

↘️ I don’t like living in the city, it’s too loud

Present – Excercise to design your life through current emotions

The wheel of life

Now let’s look at our life through a more abstract emotional lens.

How do you feel about key areas of your life?

• 💪🏻 Health
• 🧑🏻‍🦰 Mental state
• 💗 Relationships
• 💼 Work & personal projects
• 💵 Finances
• 🎮 Leisure

Don’t over-analyse the labels.
This is an emotional exercise, let your gut feelings guide you.

eg. Relationships might be romantic, they might be your community.

The goal is to identify what is most important to us,
and identify the areas of your life that need more attention.

There are no right or wrong answers,
this is your life.

This will be important when it comes time to set goals.

• Don’t waste time on fancy designs. This is only a tool to structure your thoughts.
• Get out a notepad
• Draw a circle
• segment the circle for each label
• How important this area is to you? Assign a score out of 10 for each segment
• Fill in the segments, according to how satisfied and fulfilled you feel about them.
• Colour in the segment depending on how fulfilled you feel in that area.

Example

If you’d like the source files, you can subscribe for instant access to the lifestyle design worksheets

Future – Excercise to design your life through future imagination

Five Lives Framework

As creatives, we can use our imagination to build our ideal lives in our heads.
The purpose of this exercise is not to give you a mid-life crisis,
sell all your possessions and go join a hippy cult in Bali.

But take some dreams that have fallen by the wayside,
The things that used to give you joy and purpose,
and bring them back into your life.

Add your answers to your document,
and note down your answers to the following prompts:

Lifestyle design Prompts

1. Your current life, extended out 5 years at it’s most ideal circumstances.
2. Go back and talk to your ten your old self, What did you want to be when you grow up?
3. People have many skills. Imagine an alternative life where you monetized one of your hobbies
4. Money is no object. You don’t care what anyone thought about you. What would you do then?
5. If you only had 3 years to live, what would you do?
6. Feel free to make your own prompts

Example

Go back and talk to your ten your old self, What did you want to be when you grow up?

In school I wanted to be a rally driver 🤣
So I bought a cheap puddle jumper to get into motorsport. I hit the track once a month.

Goals without action are just wishful thinking…

So if you’ve completed the x3 frameworks above,
now you have some clarity about what don’t like about your life currently,
and some vague ideas about where you’d like it to go.

But remember:
without action, this is all just wishful thinking!

I used to set big goals, without any plan.
Guess what progress I made?
None.

Now we need to set concrete goals for those areas…
Last week I ran a lifestyle design workshop for Wandering Collective to show them exactly how to do that.
It was a big hit but I didn’t have time to promote it to my own audience,
so I’ll be running more workshops.

but if you’d like all the designing your life worksheets to run through the exercises yourself first…

Download the design your life worksheets