Design Your Life in 5 Steps

1. Empathize: Imagine what you want.

2. Define your problems.

3. Ideate: Come up with ideas on how you want to live your life.

4. Prototype: How can you replicate the life you want and build a prototype?

5. Test it. Live that life and take notes on what’s working and what’s not.

Empathize

Understand the user. (That’s you!) Do you know yourself? The Myers-Briggs personality test might help you understand yourself better, so it’s worth taking. I also recommend morning journaling. Begin with the end in mind. What are your bucket goals? You can use this process to help design your life.

DEFINE YOUR PROBLEMS

What are the problems you’re facing in your life? If you don’t have enough time to do what you want, can you evaluate your habits to prioritize the time you need? What are the biggest challenges standing in the way of achieving your life goals?

IDEATE

Now that you’ve defined your problems, it’s time to think about how you can solve them. I suggest that you use a big piece of paper or a journal where you can write out a lot of solutions to your problems. There are no wrong answers. You’re just exploring all the possibilities. Let yourself imaging whatever those possibilities could be.

PROTOTYPE

You get to write out what your ideal week would be, what your ideal life would look like, and then build that prototype. There can be a lot of planning in this phase. What are some lifestyle changes you want to test?

TEST IT

That leads us to the last step. In testing these changes, you may find you don’t want something you really thought you did. That’s the great thing about this design thinking process: you’re testing it out. It’s just a small commitment. And then, you can go back to Step 1, where you’re empathizing with yourself. You can define new problems. And by going through this design process, you can create a life you’ll love.

I hope you’ll use this process to build mini-experiments that move you closer to achieving the goals and lifestyle you really want. Let me know what your goals are in the comments. How will you use the design thinking process to make those changes?