Many people spend 40 - 50 hours per week at work. That's 80 - 100 THOUSAND hours over a career. If you're not engaged or functioning at your peak, or if you're on the brink of exhaustion and burn out, you're having a suboptimal life experience. 

The answer isn't necessarily to make a drastic change like quitting your job. 

Contrary to New Year's resolution conventions, broad, sweeping changes aren't actually effective for most humans. That's because big changes shock our system, which is stressful. And we tend to revert to the mean, or fall back on old habits, pretty quickly when we're under stress. Fortunately, there's a more effective, albeit often counterintuitive, way to make meaningful lasting changes: experimentation.

Through the lens of life design, which is a special blend of psychology and design thinking applied to your life, experimentation means identifying a friction point (a challenging situation, habit, or interpersonal pattern) and designing small changes to test out. As you implement each small experiment, you gain valuable data in the form of experience, and you use that information to iterate - to revise, revamp, and move forward with the next small step. 

You are the architect of your life experience. You are either living by design or by default. You have more control over your daily experience than you might think, regardless of who you report to or your job responsibilities. While you realistically may not be able to change or impact some of your friction points, there are almost certainly some things you can experiment with. 

Tips to Try 

Your day-to-day experience is significantly impacted by your physical space and the rhythms and habits of your day. Are yours working for you or against you? 

Choose some of these strategies to test out for a few weeks. Be sure to gather some data over time to see what kind of impact your experiments have.

Set up your workspace

*This is especially important if you work from home.

• Have a designated spot for work. Eat or take breaks in a different place. 
• Get natural light if possible.
• Remove distractions. Don't rely on willpower. Put distractions away. Out of sight is out of mind. 

Create boundaries in your day

*This is especially important to avoid work bleeding into home/family/leisure time.

• Set a firm beginning and end time for work
• Set an auto-responder outside of those times and don't check email. You'll have more success if you can't see notifications on your phone; they're hard to ignore.
• Perform a ’transition activity’ (something that takes the place of a commute & tells your mind you’re done for the day). If you have a commute, use it as a time to transition by singing along with your favorite music or listening to a podcast, not ruminating about work.
• Keep a good planner like The Self Journal.

Combat Zoom fatigue 

• Hide your own face from the meeting (here’s how). Doing so will cut down on distraction and self-criticism.
• Set expectations with your team about when they can turn video off.
• Change meetings to 45 minutes to leave time to get up and move in between.

Make time for self-care

*The quality of your work and your relationships will improve if you're taking care of yourself. Think of it like this, high performance cars need regular servicing and maintenance to run optimally. So do you!

• Schedule your basic needs (lunch, movement, rest) and breaks into your calendar and treat them like appointments.
• Block time in your calendar for active work so that you can have uninterrupted time to focus on important tasks. This will keep others from scheduling your time away from you.
• Have a big bottle of water near you. You'll drink more if you don't have to exert effort to get a glass of water, and your brain will work better if you're well-hydrated.
• Build brief movement breaks into your day. Even 5 minutes of yoga (example), dancing to 1 song, or pacing while you're on phone calls can help.

“How you spend your days is how you spend your life. You're never stuck."

- Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Design Your Work Life

The strategies above are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to designing your work experience. On January 18th during our live Quarterly Psych Strength Building workshop, we'll be diving deeper into both psychology and life design to help you find more fulfillment at and outside of work without having to change your actual job responsibilities. There are still some spots available. If you can't make it to live event, you can still get access to the replay and downloadable workbook. Get your ticket here: