Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

Her findings showed not only a positive relationship between authenticity and wellbeing, but also between authenticity and what she called ‘engagement’. It amounted to a striking discovery. When people make decisions that align with their personal values and sense of self, they aren’t just happier; they’re more engaged with the tasks before them.

Ask yourself: ‘If I was to make the 12-month celebration a reality, what would I need to do over the next year to get there? And what is the first action step: joining that gym down the road? Polishing up my CV? Putting a weekly chat with my mum in the diary? Suddenly, your values are no longer about the distant future. They’re about your steps in

the ‘12-month celebration’. This is my favourite method to convert dreams into actions. The idea is simple. Imagine it’s twelve months from now and you’re having dinner with your best friend. You’re celebrating how much progress you’ve made in the areas of life that are important to you over the last year. Look back over the values that you identif

Next, you rate how aligned you feel in each area of your life. Ask yourself: ‘To what extent do I feel like my current actions are aligned with my personal values?’ And colour in the segment accordingly – if you feel fulfilled, fill it in entirely; if you feel completely unfulfilled, leave it blank.

The wheel of life, Dr Lillicrap explained, was a coaching framework we could use to define success for ourselves. You start by drawing a circle and slicing it up into nine segments. Around the edges of each spoke of the wheel, you write down the major areas of your life. Below are the ones that Dr Lillicrap recommended as a starting point, although

Values affirmations make our most abstract ideals real. And they boost our confidence along the way. So values affirmations make our most abstract ideals real. And they boost our confidence along the way. The only question is how to find these values – and how to use them.

And so I changed track. The odyssey plan inspired me to focus on growing my business, instead of continuing on the path to become a medical consultant. To this day, whenever I’m at a crossroads, I repeat this exercise. By sketching out the paths ahead, you can work out which one you really want to take.

At the heart of the exercise was a simple question: what do you want your life to look like in five years’ time? Nothing particularly profound there, I thought; anyone who has ever had a middle-of-the-road job interview has thought about that one. But Burnett’s design mindset offers an unusual way to answer the question. He invites you to reflect o

exactly what I wanted from life eluded me. That’s when a friend told me about a particular exercise from the eponymous Design Your Life book. It promised to turn my vague ideas about what I wanted into a clear picture underpinned by evidence. The approach was called the ‘odyssey plan’.