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Welcome to season 3 of Design Lessons!

Season 3 is special because it is focused on you. It will give you the opportunity to focus on one specific area of your life that you would like to make just a little bit better.

Grab Your Project You 30 Day Planner and let’s get started.

Hey Designers:
How did your week go? You spent last week gathering data for your Project You. You paid attention to your highs and your lows and jotted them down at the end of the day. You were curious about what barriers contributed to your lows and what boosted your highs, or maybe you tried the question strategy. If any of this doesn’t sound familiar, then I urge you to start with episode 41 of Design Lessons. This is when we began Project You together. Download the free Project You 30 Day Action Planner too. It’s our companion over the next few weeks as we engage in Project You.

Before we get started with our next step in the process I wanted to ask you a favor. Even though you are doing Project You for you. I’d love for us all to be able to share what we are focusing on and how it’s going. Often times when you are working on a new habit or routine, you want to share it with others. Sharing also helps in terms of momentum, support, and accountability. I offer all of these to you. Take a second and leave a voice message at Speakpipe.

Share your experience with Project You

It will ask you to share your first name and email. This lets me contact you in case I have any questions about your recording. Once you hit record, share your first name, what you decided to focus on for your project, and if you have any questions add those too. I would love to add all of our voices to our conversation and answer any questions and help you shape your project along the way.

To recap we are using the LEADER framework which I adapted from the design thinking process. It helps us to adopt a reflective mindset about our lives. As we move through the process together over the next few weeks we will work on a mini life design that is going to make one aspect of our lives a little better.

So LEADER stands for Listen, have Empathy, Access your ideas, Design a solution, Experiment, and Reflect. It allows you to become a leader in your life. Although you can’t account for all of life’s experiences you can design solutions to some of your challenges by being mindful of what affects you.

This past week you were in the listening phase. You paid attention or were mindful of what was working for you and what wasn’t working for you. You asked what if questions about your life. Now you have all of this data to take with you into the Empathy phase.

During this phase, you are going to sift through your data and choose your focus. Since we can’t change your entire life in 30 days. That’s a longer process and would be part of a macro life design. I have a course for that which is currently in development that will let us take a look at many areas of your life and help you prioritize your dreams and make them actionable and achievable. But I digress.

Over the next month or so, we are focusing on habit, or routine that when refined will make a significant difference in your life. So what did you find out when you listened this week? When I interviewed Amy Chambers in episode 2 of this podcast. I remember her saying that mindfulness is just the act of paying attention. So what did you learn this week by being mindful.

If you chose one of the questions in the Project You 30 Day Action Planner then you already have the question that you are going to investigate. However, if you did take notes on the highs and lows from the week then we are going to create your question right now.

To help you sift through your own data. I’ll give you an example from my week and how it led me to the question I’m investigating.

There was one day that was a level ten day for me this past week.

I woke up early around 4:30 AM. I had gone to bed early so I had plenty of sleep. I remember feeling calm and relaxed because so much of my morning was ahead of me. I had plenty of time just for me before work. I sat on the back porch with my husband, Christian, and our two Great Danes Layla and Nero. The air had just a little chill, not enough for a jacket, but enough for a fire. I sipped my tea, and I wrote a list of what I was grateful for in that moment. I also finished a draft of my teaching philosophy for a project I’m working on. I’m sure I’ll share it with you sometime. Once I got to work, my day was full of lessons where I was writing with my kids. My sixth and seventh graders are creating multimedia book reviews. Their “editors” at the New York Times have asked them to create book reviews for the online edition. My 8th graders are engaged in rhetorical analysis of Dr. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” So I was writing and conferring with my students for most of the day. During my planning, I finished my 3rd quarter grading and I left school with nothing in my bag to take home. A win for sure. I finished out the day with dinner with Christian and an episode of The Gilded Age. It’s on HBO Max if you want to check it out. It’s a period piece from the creators of Downton Abbey. And it feels more up-to-date and relatable. I love Peggy and The Russells the best.

As I reflect on this particular level ten day. I think to myself, What made this day a level ten? What helped it to be a good day? In retrospect, there were three factors. The first one is sleep. I had about 7 hours of sleep, and I know that good sleep sets me up for a positive day. The second is that I woke up early and had time for reflection and for myself before I needed to leave the house. The third is that I completed two significant things that day: the final grading for the quarter and an essay about my teaching philosophy. This is data from one day. In taking data from across the week for a few days as you have done, I might see a pattern. When I look back at this day, it would seem that it is my morning and evening routine that makes a difference in how my day will be going forward. It was the good sleep that set me up to have the time in the morning to center my day and accomplish one of my writing goals before I left for work that day.

Now let me say this. There is nothing special about a morning routine. If mornings are your high energy time, then making time for yourself in the morning makes sense. However, if your high energy time is late at night, then by all means prioritize that. There is so much talk about morning routines as if they are the holy grail to a good day. For me, that is true because that is when I am most creative, but you have to figure out what works for you.

So based on this data the question I need to ask myself is:

How can I design my life so that I have this reflective and productive time in the morning for myself?

Look over your data. What patterns are you seeing? What question do you need to ask yourself? This is the question that defines the focus of your design and will serve as the basis for the next step in the LEADER process which is accessing your ideas.

Based on what you observed about your highs and lows this week, what is your question that is driving your design?

Once you have your question that is specific to your experience, you are ready to move on to the next phase, accessing your ideas. This is when we generate as many ideas as we can to create our design. We will move on to this phase in our next episode.

In the meantime, sit with your question. Make sure that it is the right question for you. When we meet again we will generate designs based on your question and we will select the one to put into action.

In the meantime, go to https://www.speakpipe.com/DesignLessonsPodcast and leave a voice message. What is the question that you are investigating? How has the process been for you so far? What questions about the process do you have? Answer any or all of these. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Until next time designers,