Designing Your Work Life Exercises: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Designing Your Work Life Exercises, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Designing Your Life, Made Practical
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package. - Prototype with conversations and experiences
Test a possible path cheaply — talk to someone living it, or try a small slice — before betting on it.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - Lifestyle Design, Made Practical
Lifestyle design is the deliberate act of deciding what you want your daily life to look and feel like — then building backward from that vision to structure work, time, and location accordingly. Tim Ferriss popularized the framework; many of its tactics (mini-retirements, geographic arbitrage, outsourcing) are anecdotal or practitioner-reported rather than studied, but the underlying principle of deliberate design over passive default is well supported by goal-setting and autonomy research. - Assign broad themes to days of the week
Dedicate each weekday to a broad category of work (deep creation, meetings, admin) to reduce context-switching.
Ideal Week Design - Write your Workview and Lifeview
Articulate what work is for and what life is for — then check whether they point the same way.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Design your ideal week before you fill it
Draw the week you want to live, then defend it from the week that arrives.
Lifestyle Design, Made Practical - Apply three good things to work contexts specifically
Use the exercise to rewire what you notice about your work day — contribution, competence, and collaboration.
Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice - Draft three Odyssey Plans
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s this other life I daydream about constantly, but it stays a fantasy in my head
- My days are a blender
- What I believe my work is for and what I believe my life is for seem to be quietly pulling in opposite directions, so every big choice feels like a coin-flip
- I already know what I’m good at, but I only ever use those strengths in the same few familiar places
- Every week fills itself with whatever lands in my calendar first, and I get to Friday having never touched the things I actually care about
Related concerns
- Designing Your Life At Work
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- How To Design Your Life
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- Design Your Life Bill Burnett
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- Design Your Life Campaign
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- Design Your Life Stanford
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- Designing The Life You Want
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.