What it means to Design your Life (and why it's urgent to start now)

Nothing in life stays perfectly neutral. Everything (no matter how slowly) is changing — either growing or dying — and that includes your life. It fills with whatever is urgent and whatever other people need, and the things you actually want get whatever time is left over. Intentions turn into action about half the time. Deciding on purpose how your hours get spent is a skill, not a personality trait, and it can be learned. This page is the case for learning it: what designing your life means, why it matters, what gets in the way for most people, and how the practice answers it.

What designing your life means

optml was built on two beliefs: that we should design our lives, and that our lives are multi-faceted.

What does it mean to design your life? It is not a vision board and it is not a productivity system. It is the practice of naming what you actually want in life, choosing which of those things to prioritize this season, giving them next steps, putting those steps on the calendar, and then reflecting and adjusting. A designed life is one where the life you live and who you have become got there because you chose them. The alternative is not a neutral life. It is a defaulted one, where the experience of your weeks was decided by whoever needed you most and whatever was due next.

And life is multi-faceted. At optml, we call it Whole-Life Ambition: success in only one area of life isn't really success at all. If your career is amazing, but you can't climb two flights of stairs without stopping, or you never have friends you can call when times are hard, you are unlikely to be truly fulfilled and happy. For us, success is measured in excellence in all of the Optml Six. And you define that for yourself: nobody hands you the definition.

The Optml Six

You can read more about the Optml Six, but here is the summary:

1. Power: Your body, energy, and vitality. Excellence here might be a marathon or it might be sleeping through the night. It might be going to the gym regularly, or finding a new sport you love. Health is wealth, and it has to be prioritized.
2. People: Your relationships (friends and family) and sense of belonging. Excellence is deliberate attention those around you, who make your life feel worth sharing. We are social beings who deserve to do life with people we love.
3. Potential: Your learning, growth, and developing capabilities. Excellence is the pursuit of growth, whether that's being a beginner at something, or mastering something we've loved for a long time.
4. Prosperity: The resources and financial foundations that support your life. Excellence is stability, freedom, and the ability to choose, defined around your circumstances.
5. Purpose: Meaningful work, contribution, and a sense of direction. Excellence is effort that feels like it means something, whether it is paid or not.
6. Play: Fun, creativity, curiosity, and adventure. Excellence is experiences worth having for their own sake, without having to justify themselves.

Excellence in all six is the goal, not completing a weekly to-do list. In any one season, one or two pillars might get more effort, but all six should be moved forward every week.

Why it matters

Who cares? Because the alternative to a Well-Designed Life is not merely a Neutral one. It is a Net-Negative one.

Without intentionality, our default is to do what we have always done, or less important things that merely feel urgent: cleaning the house instead of mailing a handwritten card for a friend's birthday. There are two reasons for this.

First, our brains are lazy. It is easier to do what we have always done. Between 35 and 43 percent of what people do each day is habit: repeated almost daily, in the same place, with their thoughts somewhere else entirely. And even when we do intend something different, action is taken only about half the time. The problem is not laziness — these are people who fully intend to act but then don't — it's because nothing in their week made the action happen.

The second is that urgent tasks fill our lives. "The mere urgency effect" describes our tendency to choose time-sensitive tasks over more impactful ones. This effect is strongest among people who describe themselves as chronically busy. Luckily, reminding yourself what actually matters removes the urgency and helps people focus on the actually important tasks.

But we also know the following three things.

The most important one is that life is short. The average life is about four thousand weeks long (just under 77 years). If you are forty, more than two thousand of them are already spent.

And we know that not doing leads to regret. The regrets that persist are the things we didn't do. Studies have found that regrets in education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure run deepest, and are most intense when people can still see the opportunity to do those things. The things you could still do are the ones that people regret most.

But, to quote Tony Robbins, progress equals happiness. Studies have found that progress toward a goal is tied to wellbeing more strongly than finishing it, and that it brings us happiness to feel in control of our time, not to get more done.

So the result of not structuring our time and not living the lives we want is not merely a neutral life. It is an unhappier one. Living the default costs you something every week, whether or not you ever see the bill.

The problem: the three ways people get stuck

Most people I talk to are stuck in one of three places.

1. They are living the life they thought they had to, and may not even know what their dreams are. This is the sneakiest one, because nothing looks wrong. They have always lived this way; the career, the city, the defaults they inherited rather than choices they made. And it never occurred to them to ask whose desire the default was. Very often it was someone else's: a parent's definition of a good career, an industry's definition of a good year, a society's definition of a good decade.

   In "Regrets of the Dying," Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who spent years with people in their final weeks, wrote that the regret she heard more than any other was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

2. They have dreams, but they don't have the time or space to prioritise them. They know exactly what they want. It is just always "someday." The week is genuinely full: the job, the children, the parents, the commute, the admin that has to be done. A dream that starts and ends with "one day," leading to envy for others who achieved it. But we all get the same amount of time, and unless we prioritize, the default will always be the more urgent thing (see above).

3. They want to pursue their dreams, but they don't know how. The dream is real and Tuesday is real, and there is no visible path between them. "I want to become an artist" does not tell you what to do this week. So the dream gets tabled, along with all the other ideas, and none of them gets tried. This is the gap most advice ignores. It tells you to dream bigger when what you needed was a smaller first step.

None of these is a verdict on you. Each one is a design problem, and design problems have solutions.

The solution

Before anything else, the system starts with a premise you may not have granted yourself: you are worthy of pursuing your dreams. Not once the promotion lands, not once the children are older, not once every condition is perfect. Now, in the life you actually have.

Some ambitions take years, but without the belief that you can and will be able to execute on them, you may never make meaningful progress. You are worth the investment in yourself.

From there, optml helps you do three things for your dreams.

1. It helps you name them. You rate the six pillars of your life honestly, and for each one you write two things: a vision for three to five years from now, in your own words, and one goal for the coming year that would move you toward it. If you were to live out all six of these visions in five years, how amazing would your life be? Articulating the vision brings it to life.

2. It helps you pursue them. A year-long goal is too big to act on in a week, so you break it down into quarterly goals: what has to be true by the end of the next three months for the year to be on track. Then, every Sunday in the Sunday Check-In, you choose the actions that get this week's attention and give each one a day and a time on the calendar, in its pillar's color. The quarter moves forward week over week instead of waiting for a free month that never comes.

3. It helps you reflect. The next Sunday you look at what was planned against what happened. Was the week a success? Where did you want your time to go, and where did it actually go? A glance at the colors on your calendar reveals the truth. That answer feeds the next week's choices, and the same look-back at the end of each quarter and each year feeds the next goal. That loop is the whole method, and the four planning styles are four ways into it, depending on whether you like to start with a destination or find one by trying.

The people who practice this call themselves optmlists: people ambitious about their whole lives. Some dreams take years. They can still start this week. Build a life you'd choose to live again.