Quarantine Lessons: Design Your Life

This oversized jeans and crop top combo might have you thinking that all I’ve done this quarantine is work on my stay-at-home look, but I promise that’s not —all— I’ve been up to. 

During the past few weeks, I’ve seen friends and family lose their jobs, get sick, and shift their life and career plans. This has made me think in-depth about my life, career, and health. I imagine many of you are going through the same thing. So, I want to share some of what I’ve been learning in hopes that you can use this pause to re-design your life.

I’ve been reading “Designing Your Life”, a book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans – two Stanford University design educators. The book’s goal is to help you figure out what you want and design a life that’s based on the real world and the real you. I highly recommend that you read it, but in the meantime, I want to walk you through the first book exercise. 

To design your “new” life, you might have to fix some problems. To solve problems, you need to identify them correctly. You don’t want to spend time working on the wrong problem. You’ll start by assessing four aspects of your life: health, work, love, and play. Assessing just means writing a couple of lines or a paragraph that answers to how are you doing in each aspect. Then, you’ll rate each aspect on a scale from empty to full. The authors recommended thinking of this like the gauges on your car’s dashboard. Just like you can tell if your car is running low on gas, you’ll be able to tell how full or low are your life’s health, love, work and play gauges.

This might sound silly, but I think evaluating your life with honesty, and displaying it visually can lead to good insights. In the worst-case scenario, you’ll end up knowing what you already know. In my case, I was able to pinpoint some aspects of my health that I would like to work on. I found that my work gauge was pretty full, while my play gauge not so much. While I have a wonderful relationship with my husband, I tend to put other relationships on the back burner, especially when I am too stressed or busy. These are things I want to work on. While having a perfect life might be impossible, you can try to have a pretty well-balanced life. What the right balance is will depend entirely on you. If you are single and starting your career, you might want to spend more time at work or doing things just for fun. If you are raising children, you might want to have your love and health gauges fuller than your work one. It all depends on you and what makes your life happy and purposeful. 

Are you ready to do your assessment? Reflect on the following as you write:

Health

Consider mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Work

Consider paid and unpaid work. Home chores are just as important and valuable as any other job.

Love

Who are the people in your life? How is love flowing to and from you?

 Play

Write a list of the things you do just for fun. While this can involve productive activities, it’s not the things you do for merit or improvement. It’s the things you do just because they make you happy. 

How full are your gauges? A quarter, half-full, three-quarters, or pretty full? How do you feel about these levels? 

I hope this exercise gave you some insight into where you are at now and where you want to be. If you found aspects that you want to work on, there’s no better time than the present. As the book authors say, life design never ends. Until you die, you can continue to change your life. You’re never too early or too late.

Story: Aurola Wedman Alfaro @aurola.wedman

Photography: William Viquez-Mora @willviquez