Life Design: How to Design and Live Your Dream Life

"What do you fundamentally want is life?" is a big question to ask. So how do you start answering it? In this lecture you will dive into the different parts of this question to better understand what type of answers you are looking for. What do we mean by fundamental? What can you want in life? What are the reasons you want something in the first place?

In this exercise you will use the "five whys" tool to get a deeper understanding of why you want the things you want in life.

What we want you to do is the following (5 min):

1. Think of one thing that you want in your life the coming year

2. Ask why several times until you get so deep that the only answer you can come up with is “because it makes sense”, “because it feels good” or something like that. Usually, this takes about 5 “whys”

3. Repeat the two first steps for a few more of your wants

4. You can answer this exercise by using the handout (see link below), a piece of paper or the simple survey form linked to underneath.

In this lecture you will dive into the reasons for why you should look for experiences and impacts that both feels good and makes sense. Why can't you just do what feels good to you?

In this exercise, you will walk through a simple questionnaire that will cast light on what makes you feel good and what makes sense to you. You'll find the questionnaire in the handout or by following the link underneath.

In this lecture we will offer you our view of what makes sense to spend our time on. We will summarise our view into a few simple guidelines that you can choose to adopt and fine-tune with your own views and vocabulary. Such simple guidelines has the power to dramatically improve your decision making, and will be the foundation for every decisions you will make in this course.

This is the first of four exercises with the aim of understanding your current balance between Feel, Be and Do Good. In this exercise we are looking at this balance through the way you make decisions.

So what are the biggest decisions you have made this year? Why did you make the decision?

Was it mostly to feel, be or do good?

You will find a template in the handout that you can use to answer this exercise, see Exercise 3.

Just a quick check inn after doing the first exercise with the aim of understanding your current balance between Feel, Be and Do Good.

In this exercise you will gain some more insights into your current balance between Feel, Be and Do Good by understanding how you spend your time and why.

So, pick a typical day from your previous week? How did you spend your time? Why did you spend your time this way? Was it to feel good, to be good to others or do good for the world?

Use the template in the handout to answer this exercise, see Exercise 4.

In this exercise you will finish up your data gathering to understand your current balance. This time you will look into some actual behaviours and see how often you think, feel and act in certain ways, related to feel, be and do good.

To do this exercise, you just need to answer a simple questionnaire that you will find in the handout or through following the link below.

The last exercise of the exercises aiming at understanding your current balance between feel, be and do good, will summarise over your answers to the three previous exercises.

You will meet your three guardian angels that are whispering in your ear and impacting all your decisions in life.

You will find a template in the handout you can use to answer this exercise, see Exercise 6.

What feel, be and do good balance do you want going forward?

You will approach this question by evaluating your current balance and consider if you want to make any changes.

So, your current balance. Do you like it? Is there anything about your current balance you would like to change?

You will find a template in the handout you can use to answer this exercise, see Exercise 7.

Congratulations, you are now done with Step 1 of the method. You have a first draft of what you fundamentally want to get out of your life. That is, you know your desired balance between feel, be and do good.

Let's take a look at what this means and where to go next.

After finishing up Step 1 of the method, you know more about what you fundamentally want in life. But, if you keep spending your time as you do today, you will just keep getting more of the same experiences and impacts as you get today. You will continue to colour your pixels and pictures as you have always done and you will continue down the same life journey you were on before taking this course.

So, if you decided to make some changes in your balance between feel, be and do good going forward, you also need to reflect these changes in the way you spend your time day in and day out.

To make it easier for you to identify what changes you want to make, we have divided your life into several life areas that you can choose to make changes to.

In this lecture we will introduce you to the most typical life areas people want to change. You can use this menu of life areas as an inspiration for the following exercises.

It is time for you to select the life areas that you want to improve over the next 1-3 years.

What we want you to do is to first look through all the possible life areas and then:

1. Identify three areas that you want to improve the next one to three years

2. For each life area, imagine the change. What do you see? Make notes.

3. Describe the change you want to make with a few sentences

4. Identify the one thing you would like to start changing right away

You will find several templates you can use to answer this exercise in the handout, see Exercise 8.1 - 8.4.

Extra Credits: Instead of just describing the change you want to make with words, it's very powerful to make a collage of pictures to describe the change. Print out the collage and hang it up on your refrigerator, for constant reminders.

Before we wrap up this step, we will ask you to capture your chosen life areas in a system that you have easily accessible wherever you go. You will understand why you need this when we get to Step 4.

In this exercise we will show you how this system can look like and tools we suggest you to use. Then you will select your preferred tool and create your system.

This is what we will ask you to do:

1. Pick on the three application options

2. Sign up for the service and set up your system. Feel free to use the templates we have provided for Dynalist and Workflowy, see links underneath. To use the template, open the relevant link we have provided under, then choose to copy to your account.

3. Add your life areas to your system

Underneath, we will link to all the recommended tools and the templates you can select between.

Welcome to step 3 of the method. You are now more than halfway through the course! In other words, you have come far. Let’s spend a minute reflecting on what you have done so far.

In this exercise we first want to introduce you to projects. What do we mean by "projects" and why do we need them?

Then we want you to look at your prioritised life areas and decide on three to four concrete projects that you want to spend your time on the next three months:

1. Identify concrete changes you want to see in your prioritised life areas

2. Decide on what changes you want to focus on this quarter

3. Identify 3-4 small, concrete and enjoyable projects that will start realising these changes

You will, as usually, find a template you can use when working on this exercise, see Exercise 10.

As the last thing you do in Step 3 of this method, we want you to capture the projects you have decided on in your system (the system you created in Step 2).

This lecture first introduces you to how do capture your projects in your system. Then you will spend a few minutes capturing your own projects.

In this lecture we will introduce you to some typical obstacles to progress in your life areas and in your projects. Then we will show you how you can overcome these obstacles by introducing Key Results and extending the system you have already established in Step 2 and Step 3.

So, what are these obstacles we are talking about? What are Key Results? And, how does Key Results fit into the system?

The most critical step in identifying Key Results for the week is to set of time to do it every week. So book a 30 minutes recurring meeting with yourself in the beginning of your week. Just call it ”Weekly planning”.

In this meeting you will do the following:

1. Remind yourself about your priorities. That is, your life areas, your projects and other things happening in your life that you need to give attention to this week

2. For each priority, brainstorm key results that you would like to get out of the week

3. Decide on 1-5 Key Results for the week

4. Capture your selected Key Results in your system

You will try out this process in the following exercises. Now it's just important that you book this meeting in your calendar, so you will be reminded to spend time on this activity, week after week.

In this lecture we will show you how you can plan your week. What do you do in your weekly meeting with yourself?

In this exercise, you will plan your upcoming week by identifying your key results.

What we want you to do:

1. Remind yourself of your priorities

2. Brainstorm and choose 1-5 Key Results you want to get out of the week

3a. If you use Trello, capture your Key Results as cards in a new list called "Key Results"

3b. If you use Dynalist/Workflowy, capture your Key Results as bullet points under "4. Weekly and Daily Planning" under the correct week.

You can do this exercise directly in your system or use the template we have provided in the handout, see Exercise 13.1.

In this lecture you will look at how you can bring your Key Results into your day, to get progress in your life.

In this excise you will spend some time planning your next upcoming weekday.

We will ask you to do the following:

1. Look at your schedule, do you have a lot of time to do actual work?

2. Identify what Key Results you want to focus on today, given your schedule

3a. If you use Trello, capture your focus as cards in a new list called "Todos Today"

3b. If you use Dynalist/Workflowy, capture your focus as bullet points under "4. Weekly and Daily Planning", the correct week and the correct day.

We suggest that you do this exercise directly in your system. But, if you don't have access to the system right now, we have also provided you with a simple template in the handout, see Exercise 14.1.

You have now decided on what Key Results you want to focus on today. But still, this is just a plan. Nothing have yet happened. In this lecture we will look at how you can approach your day to make sure you get the most important things done. You will be introduced to the concept of "first things first".

Life Weekends are the best tool we know to make sure you evaluate, adjust and get progress on your life journey, quarter after quarter. But what exactly is a Life Weekend? How do you prepare? How do you conduct a Life Weekend? This lecture will answer those questions.

We have included some templates in the handout you can use when conducting your own Life Weekend going forward.

This lecture quickly takes you through everything you have learned in this course and provides you with our view of why it is important that people approach their life in such a way.

This is a 6 minutes summary of everything we have covered in this course. You can come back to this short video, every time you just want a quick refresh.

We also created a visualization summarizing the content, check out resources.