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The single most powerful habit I've developed this year is tracking data across 3 core pillars: Work, Health, Life.
Design Your Life was introduced to me by Mel Robbins when she introduced the concept of an Odyssey Plan. This plan is a structured brainstorming tool from Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans designed to map out three distinct, potential 5-year futures. These three futures are: the current path, the alternative "what if" path and the radical path where the idea is to ignore limitations like money, status or opinion of others.
Design Your Life is a Stanford course that teaches design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem solving and innovation through prototype iteration. It is about learning something by doing it and observing the feedback so you can iterate and continue. There are several books published by the Stanford professors and many podcasts you can listen to. I started with their book Designing Your Work Life because this is often the area that gives me the most discomfort.
One of the first exercises is a Good Work Journal Worksheet. For one week you track what you learned, what you initiated and who you helped. At the end of the week, one reflects on the worksheet and observes patterns or data that feeds into your experiments. What observations or insights did you learn? What types of work did you avoid?
One of my initial prototypes was testing if I changed my physical work environment it would improve my sense overall well-being and sense of community. This was an experiment in joining a coworking space.
As I learned more about the Design Your Life approach, I decided to track experiments across Life, Work and Health. It is recommended to have no more than one in each category. Not all of my logging was in true DYL fashion - some things were dressed as experiments but actually I was just logging my day. That's OK. It produced useful data.
Over the past 4 months, I update my log every single evening, here is what I've learned in each of these areas.
Health
For 6 months I was trialing a coworking space for £240 per month. This was one of my earlier experiments to meet new people. The commitment I made to myself was that I would go twice a week. This is something that I logged. The office was trendy, fashioned with the obligatory beer tap, onsite gym and office dogs.
The gym across the road from my home costs me £31.50 a month. I've been a member for a little over 12 months. It is full of old skool body builders rather than tripod-and-ring-light-mirror-content crowd. It's a real spit and saw dust building with exposed pipes and old boilers - not in the trendy New York loft sort of way.
Three times per week I wander over to road, do my thing, usually with headphones in and come home.
Every week my gym attendance held up whereas my desire to go to the coworking space did not.
The coworking space involved effort - food prep due to poor eating establishments nearby, showing up, trying to be sociable and make connections. My reasons for being there were to work and meet new people.
The gym requires effort and turning up. Weeks when I've been emotionally wrecked, grieving, low, tearful - I still lifted. My reasons for being at the gym are to lift - the social contact was a byproduct, not the main purpose.
The feedback loop in the gym is immediate - heavy lift day, slow run day, explosive day. The coworking space gave me a desk and an occasional compliment on my lunch.
The gym asked nothing of me socially yet somewhere in the repetition, connections formed. Some weeks a hug from a regular. Others, a conversation about grief that I had not planned on having. Once or twice, technique sharing with the other woman.
What I had not accounted for in my life experiments was that community is a byproduct of a consistent presence, not deliberate engineering.
Work
What keeping a daily log has thought me about work is the underperforming feeling isn't coming from actually underperforming. It's coming from doing good work in a system that isn't designed to register it.
I'm often told that I do great work, that my lens is wide and my strength lies in being untethered from a team. This freedom allows me to spend time doing research, synthesising industry best practices and bringing them into the organisation.
Since leaving my former role over 4 years ago I've not been embedded in any one team. The truth is I have a specific but somewhat unusual skillset that sits in an intersection most organisations don't have a box for. Without structural attachment to a team or initiative, every piece of work exists in a grey area. These grey areas don't generate the feeling of accomplishment that I need.
I can see the problem clearly. I just can't fix it from where I'm standing. That particular combination - clear diagnosis, limited agency - costs me more than I expected.
That's a very specific kind of demoralising.
Life
There are few things bigger in life than processing the death of one's Mother.
To heal from grief, it needs to be witnessed. The wearing of a black dress in Victorian times signalled you were to be treated with care due to mourning. It explained your sombre mood and withdrawal from society.
Grief didn't just make me sad, it showed me existing gaps that are now impossible to ignore. The connection gaps, the community gaps, the belonging gap, the "what do I actually enjoy doing in life" gap.
My Mother died of dementia so you're dealing with anticipatory grief for a long time. Without realising it I've been grieving for about 2 years. This has caused me to hyper focus on friendship as a problem to solve. Hence the coworking space. Every social interaction that I was trying to engineer now had more weight.
"I must keep reading these terrible books in this book club if I want to make friends"
When I quit drinking alcohol over 10 years ago, I never consciously designed what would fill the social infrastructure it created. I simply withdrew from friendship groups or events that I found challenging to be around. As someone who is good with solo time, this was not usually a problem.
Then my Mum died. Grief has highlighted this unfinished business.
Closing Thoughts
I started the year (1) bereft with grief (2) fear of job losses due to AI (3) angry AF at these fucking tech bros snake oil.
The experiments continue.
What a time to be alive!
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