The idea that I’m working on here is to try and use architectural principles to redesign the structure of your life to create new structures that feel “alive” and propels you forward.
The first step is to capture a vision of how you’d life to be in the future. The idea isn’t to set goals but to get a sense of how your life feels, looks, appears.
The next step is to get a general sense of the structures that make up your present life. Think about an architect surveying a plot of land. What are the features of the landscape? What are the existing structures? What are the weaknesses or restrictions?
Keep It Simple
I think the simplest and ultimately best way to go about this is to sketch out the broad outlines of your life. I’ve tried other approaches, such as keeping an hourly log of how I spend my time during a week, and found that getting too much detail too soon can leave you with a model that’s hard to adapt.
What seems to work pretty well is to start with your stack of index cards (or Post-Its) just as you did with the visioning process.
Label the first card “My Life as a Whole.” This card is a container for everything that makes up your life, known or unknown.
On the back of the card make a list of the things that come to mind as you think about your life: family, work, hobbies, health. The list doesn’t have to be exhaustive, just capture the high points. Be sure to list areas of your life that need repair, such as “wasting time,” or “too much junk food.”
Break It Down
Once you feel like you’ve pretty well summed up your “life as a whole” on the back of the index card, you can start making new cards for each of these areas.
On the back of each of these cards I make notes about what goes into them.
For example, on the back of my “Exercise” card I have:
- Rowing machine: 20 min. 3x weekly
- Cycling: 30 min. to 3 hrs. 3x weekly
- Walking: 1-2 miles daily
Once I’ve got cards for most of the broad areas of my life I look to see if I can continue breaking these down into subcategories on separate cards. For instance, looking at the back of my exercise card I see that I can break each of these activities down into individual cards, rowing, cycling, walking.
At some point you will get to an activity that doesn’t need to be broken down further. For instance Rowing machine: 20 min. 3x weekly is pretty much a fundamental structure in my life. I make a dark outline on the card to indicate this.
I keep working this way, breaking each area of my life down to its components as long as these are obvious. Not every area will break down easily into fundamental structures. For instance I have an area in my life that I call “personal development” that includes reading, listening to podcasts, trying new things. But I don’t do this in any regularly structured way. This card is a general container for unstructured activities and it’s OK to leave it that way for now.
The end result will be a collection of notes that do a pretty good job of describing the shape of your life right now. It doesn’t have to have every last detail, just the broad outlines at this point.
