A book I recommend to many coaching clients is “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I’ve even had a client use a several month coaching engagement specifically to focus on the exercises in the book. What makes it such a potent tool? Design thinking.

What happens if we take the same principles that are used to create the fastest road bike or most efficient electric vehicle and apply them to help us live our best life? The concept was not only intriguing, it blew me away. In today’s episode we break down one tool from Designing Your Life: gauging how full/empty we are in 4 buckets of life (health, love, work, play), determining if these buckets are in balance, and introducing the process for rebalancing.

Awake + Aware | Our 2026 Retreat

Join us at Awake and Aware, our 3-day retreat in Scottsdale, AZ. March 1-4, 2026. Space is limited.

Learn More Here

🎓 P.S. This is a CME event.

The Flameproof Course

The hidden anti-burnout curriculum we all should have learned in training. Cohort 3 begins Sept 10, 2024. Get the deets

For full show notes of this episode and all sorts of other goodies, visit our podcast website

We Discuss:

“Designing Your Life” thinking is about approaching life from the perspective of engineering and design, building prototypes to see what does/doesn’t work and using that information to create your next iteration.
When thinking about the quality of your life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans suggest that you assess your life in terms of these 4 distinct yet overlapping areas: health, work, love, and play.
Start with health, since it is the foundation of all of the other gauges or buckets (pick your metaphor).
While it is often imbalance the work gauge/bucket that brings people to seek the help of a physician coach, work is just another bucket in the totality of what goes into making your life.
The love bucket takes into consideration both the love you give and the love you receive.
The final gauge is play. Play is vital because it allows you to massively recharge.
Once you have determined where your gauges fall or the fullness of your 4 buckets, the next step is to determine whether there is an imbalance and how to correct it. Only you can answer that.

71. Designing Your Life | How an engineer recommends evaluating your work, health, love, and play

Stimulus - Learn Tools to Crush It in Your Medical Career

71. Designing Your Life | How an engineer recommends evaluating your work, health, love, and play