Designing my own life
THE FUTURE OF WORK:
TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATION,
AND COLLABORATION
For a while now, days had been slipping through my fingers. I'd open emails in the morning, react to whatever the day threw at me, fall asleep exhausted, and still feel like I'd barely touched the things that actually mattered. In a course called The Future of Work, I decided to treat this as a design problem instead of a personal failing.
The question I started with was simple: why do I keep living reactively instead of intentionally, and is there a structured way to find direction? The work was running the methods from Burnett and Evans' Designing Your Life on myself, treating my own life like a UX project with real users, real data, and real iteration.
Speculative
Futurism
Design challenge
IKEA
The brief
The course asked us to apply a design framework outside of a traditional product context. I picked my own life. Not as a self-help exercise, but as a way to test whether design methods that work on interfaces and services actually hold up when the user is yourself and the product is how you spend your week.
In a casual conversation with my classmate Lucie Z. from Information Service Design, we admitted we weren't alone in this. A lot of people our age balance between overload, drift, and the sense that something important is leaking away. That was the trigger. Treat it as a brief, not a mood.
I went with Designing Your Life because the methods are concrete. Not "find your passion" advice, but specific exercises with inputs and outputs. I didn't expect a transformation. I wanted a new angle on a stuck situation, and I got one.
Mapping the current state
Before designing anything, I needed a baseline. The first method, the Life Dashboard, asks you to rate four areas, work, play, love, and health, on a scale of one to ten. Quick, visual, blunt.
The data was more honest than I expected. Work scored 8 out of 10, which matched how I actually feel about UX, I like the work, but it sometimes spills past its edges and eats the rest. Play came in at 5. Creative side projects, portfolio work, walks, just being outside, I'd quietly been pushing all of it into "later." Health also 5, the gap between what I know I should do and what I actually do. Love sat at 4. Not a crisis, just stagnation, mostly online contact, nothing being built.
The Dashboard isn't a sophisticated method. That's the point. It gave me a map of where I actually was, not where I assumed I was, and the gap between the two was the useful part.
Work view vs. life view
The next step, taken from the book, was to write two short texts, one about how I see my work, the other about how I see life as a whole, and then look at where they overlap and where they don't.
When I wrote about work, I realised I love it most when the output has some kind of positive effect, when it helps someone or moves something forward. When I wrote about life, I realised I don't want it to be only about output. I want space for calm, for moments without an effect attached to them.
The reflection that came out of putting these next to each other wasn't dramatic. It was just clear: when I let work dominate, life narrows. When I let life set the rhythm, my definition of good work gets sharper. The two views don't compete, they need each other. Obvious in hindsight, not obvious before writing it down.
Good Time Journal
IThe third method, the Good Time Journal, goes deeper into daily activities. For each one, you track two things: how engaged you were, and whether the activity gave you energy or drained it.
I kept this for almost three weeks. The pattern showed up quickly. Some activities repeated. Others were entirely absent. A few days I had nothing to enter, which turned out to be data too, the absence of engagement is itself a signal worth paying attention to.
Short morning drawing and deep focus blocks on research consistently pulled me into flow and left me with energy. Email triage and organisational friction drained me without giving anything back. Creative, deep, quiet work generated energy. Reactive, fragmented work cost it. Once that was visible on paper, I started planning weeks differently, more recharge activities in, more drain activities cut or batched.
Mind maps and three values per area
From the Good Time Journal, I picked three areas where I'd consistently felt engaged: travel, friendship, and respect. For each I built a mind map, words, situations, associated concepts, and then extracted three core values per map.
Travel: experience, freedom, discovery. Friendship: trust, understanding, love. Respect: research, recognition, design.
From those nine values I sketched three hypothetical roles that would actually let them coexist: a field researcher or sociologist, a social services worker, and a service designer or researcher.
The point of this exercise isn't to pick a job. It's to widen the range of jobs that feel plausible. The book calls it a mental warm-up, and that's accurate, it loosened up the assumption that my current path is the only one that fits my values.
Three alternative selves
Before drawing up concrete five-year plans, the book suggests a stretching exercise: imagine three parallel lives. One that continues your current direction. One that takes over if the first one ended tomorrow. One that exists only if money and external expectations didn't matter.
Life one: designer in a near-future studio. Same field as now, but pushed harder, working on real future-facing problems, climate, ethical technology, care infrastructure. Design as a tool of consequence, not just aesthetics.
Life two: anthropologist on the other side of the planet. If design disappeared tomorrow, I'd go into research, human stories, distant cultures, how societies form behaviour. Probably fieldwork somewhere in the Pacific.
Life three: actor without caring about image. If money and reputation didn't matter, acting. Not for fame, for the chance to work with emotion, presence, and direct contact with people in a way design doesn't allow.
The interesting result wasn't picking a favourite. It was noticing that all three had the same underlying needs: meaning, contact with people, creative expression. Different containers, same core. That gave me a much more reliable compass than any single answer would have.
Odyssey plans
The Odyssey plans are the central method in the book. Three completely different five-year scenarios, drawn from everything that came before, the Dashboard, the Good Time Journal, the mind maps.
Plan one: quiet maker by the ocean. Living in Australia, remote UX work, regular writing, drawing, time outdoors, involvement in community initiatives. Built around freedom, meaning, calm, and contact with nature.
Plan two: academic researcher. Back in Czechia, doctoral work in service design, teaching, running seminars on design thinking and research. Structure, knowledge, passing things on. Stable, with the risk of routine.
Plan three: designer in a large company. Leading a design team in an international firm, influencing company strategy, trying not to lose the human side of the work. Changing culture from the inside, creating safer environments for colleagues, balancing performance and care.
I drew each plan, gave it a six-word title, three reflection questions, and a small dashboard rating it on resources, attractiveness, confidence, and coherence. The dashboard wasn't about picking a winner. It was about catching my emotional reaction to each one, where my body relaxed, where it tensed, where I felt curiosity versus fear.
Prototyping with real conversations
After the Odyssey plans, I prototyped, the Designing Your Life version of prototyping, which mostly means talking to people already living something close to your scenarios.
I had three open conversations. A designer working on international projects, whose work I admired but who also showed me how hard it is to keep mental balance at that pace. An anthropologist doing fieldwork, whose lifestyle was attractive in its freedom but came with real isolation and instability. An actor, who reminded me of the value of spontaneity and direct contact, though that path isn't realistic for me.
The effect of these conversations wasn't dramatic confirmation or rejection. They sharpened the difference between what genuinely pulls me and what I'd been romanticising. Design and research stayed central. What changed was the setting I wanted them to live in, more autonomy, more space to reflect, more work across cultures.
Sharing and iteration
The book recommends building a small support group, not mentors in the formal sense, just a handful of people who'll give you honest reactions and push you to keep going.
I shared the three Odyssey plans and the Good Time Journal outputs with several people from design, education, and outside my professional bubble. The reactions varied. One person confirmed doubts I already had about the academic path. Another pointed to my ability to structure and lead projects as something better suited to a company environment. One friend caught me off guard with: "You're always starting something, but I never see you stick with it for long." That landed. It pushed me to look at what actually breaks continuity for me and what I could change.
The harder lesson here was reframing failure. Not as a closed door, but as a useful filter. Designing a life isn't a one-time choice of the right path, it's continuous tuning, small experiments, honest reflection. The dialogue with other people made it clearer which ideas had real roots in my values and which were just appealing in the moment.
Choosing without locking in
After ideas and prototypes comes the moment you have to choose. Burnett and Evans are clear here: happiness isn't about finding the one right path, it's about being able to choose and stay at peace with the choice. The goal isn't the perfect option, the goal is a decision process that leads to something meaningful.
For me that meant dropping the idea of once and for all. I felt lighter once I accepted that my decisions are just another prototype, editable, exitable, learnable from. I chose the direction that combined design and research with autonomy and international, real-impact work. Not the one true answer. Just the option that makes the most sense now and opens the most useful next doors.
What I learned
The biggest shift was structural. I stopped treating the feeling of drift as a personal failure and started treating it as a design problem with methods, inputs, and iterations. That alone made it workable.
The methods themselves aren't magic. The Life Dashboard is crude. The Good Time Journal takes weeks. The Odyssey plans can easily become creative writing instead of honest planning. They work because they force you to externalise something you usually keep vague, and once it's external you can act on it. Same principle as any design artefact, an idea on paper is editable, an idea in your head isn't.
The less glamorous lesson, the one I keep coming back to: a life isn't designed once. It's a long sequence of small prototypes. Most days I still react to email before I work on anything I care about. The difference now is that I notice it, and I have a method for changing it. That's enough.
