Episode 86: Using Design-Thinking to Create Your Best Life with Susan Burnett

[MUSIC] Hi, this is Sarah Holtz. Welcome to Advice to My Younger Me, a show where women who know what it takes to succeed in the workplace share what they've learned with younger women. There's a lot of talk about how hard it is to achieve work-life balance. But today's guest, Susan Bernette, says that work-life balance shouldn't be the goal. What should be the goal instead is being at peace with your priorities and designing your days around those priorities and doing that by using design thinking rather than a time management approach. Susan Bernette leads designing your life workshops based on the principles in one of my favorite career books, "Designing Your Life." She teaches these workshops at Stanford for corporate clients and it retreats that are open to the public. I met Susan at one of her public retreats. I was so impressed with what the program had to offer that I sent my two millennial sons there. Susan comes to this work after a 36-year career, 20 years of which, whereas an executive at Hulett Packard, the Gap, Deloitte, and Yahoo. But before I get to my interview with Susan, I want to remind you to sign up for my monthly newsletter, filled with great career enhancing advice at tomyyounger.me. And now on to our show. So, Susan, welcome. Thank you. Deleted to have you here today. So, you know, there's a lot of conversation about work-life balance, particularly for women. But you come at this issue from a design perspective rather than a time management perspective, which is how most of the conversations about work-life balance take place. What's the difference? Well, I think the difference is perspective and methodology. So, when you think about methodology, the work I do in designing your life is based on design thinking. And if you don't know what design thinking is, it's a product design methodology that you actually use in order to ideate, prototype, and create great products that meet user needs. Designing your life takes that product design methodology and applies it to life design. How you frame a problem gives you room for ideation. So, if I frame work-life balance, I have framed a zero-sum game. I have framed this thing that is supposed to have a constant equilibrium. And so, that problem I'm trying to solve is, how do I stay in this constant perfection of equilibrium where everything is sort of measured equally? I like to reframe. So, let's think of work-life balance as work, love, relationships, of all kinds, health, really important to fuel yourself and your body and play. And play is, you know, fun. So, if I now say work is a quarter of this portfolio that it's about love, health, work, and play, I can then really look at, okay, where am I in all of those parts of my life? And we like to use gas gauges. So, I might say, well, today might play, frankly, today my play is a quarter full because I've got a day plan that's pretty intense and goes all the way to 7 p.m. My play is probably a quarter full today. In my whole life, how do I look at where my play is, where my love is, where my work is? And once I've done that assessment, particularly health, I can then say, okay, when I look at these gas gauges, are there areas where I want to dig in and define some opportunities to do things differently? And presumably better. And presumably better because that's where design is going to come in. And what I notice when women do this assessment is plays really low. It's the first thing that goes, work is super high. Like in many cases, their gas tanks are overflowing. I think work has, you know, this notion of 24/7 availability and all that has really made work a part of life that has just crept into consuming. Health, boy, people haven't even thought about it sometimes. And so their gas gauges might not even be half full. And so that gives a perspective of wow, these are the areas I really want to focus on. Now I need to design it differently. And I notice that this question of balance is just huge for women. So how do we begin to address this balance issue? Well, first you've got to frame what balance means to you. So I'm offering a frame of a portfolio and some way of looking at work, love, health, play in a way that makes sense to the priorities of your life now. So one woman might, for example, say that work is 80% of her life and somebody else might say it's 30% of their life because they want to spend more time on the love portion of their lives or they're facing a health issue. So that's something that needs a lot of attention. So there's no like magical formula for this. This is highly personal. There's no magical formula. You said it the best. It's highly personal. And my frame of balance is being at peace with your priorities, right? Work for me right now is 80% because I have a new job. And it's really challenging and I'm all in. And the thing I say to women is, well, tell your friends, tell people that that's where you are right now. And then design the things that are going to be really important to fueling you while you do this intense level of work. And you've got to know what fuels you. And if it's in health areas or love areas or a play area that really gives you back the energy you need to go do that 80% work, you got to design it in. So let's talk about energy because one of the things that I really valued in the workshops that I've taken with you is this I take it design principle about plotting your energy. So can you talk a little bit about that because I found it, I really learned a lot from doing it. Okay. Energy what we ask people to do is plot energy over a period of time. It could be a typical week or if you're like me, you don't have a typical week. So I say pick a daunting week and just say what are the activities you're doing? And there's a line in the middle and above the line is energy giving activities below the line is energy draining activities. And I think this is another good example where time is part of it. But what you're trying to do is really design for those things that are going to give you energy and design them in relationship to the things you have to do that may be draining. I mean if you could just delete the draining activities that'd be awesome. But you often can't. And so the one thing you do is you really look at that time and you design in energy giving against the energy draining. So there's a little bit of balance. Let's talk a little bit about how somebody might experience it. You've done this seminar with lots of women. What does this typically look like? I mean again, recognizing that this is highly personal. Well, it is highly personal. So for example, what gives my colleague Kathy energy is being outdoors. Every activity that was energy giving for her was an outdoor activity. That's not quite the same for me. Energy giving for me because I'm a real introvert is going to be things like I get an hour of reading sci-fi. I get time to walk on the beach by myself. I get meditation time. Those are energy giving for me. I can tell you energy draining in more averages like people don't like meetings. I can tell you meetings come out all the time as energy draining. And for example, Kathy, who's my colleague now has outdoor meetings with her staff because she's discovered they like being outdoors too. And sometimes she has walking meetings, one on ones that are walking, she calls them walking talks. It's a way to design a different kind of energy into something that was actually draining for her. Yeah, I love that example because basically you have to have those meetings, right? But as you said, she's designed a way that she's brought something which is energy giving to her into an environment that would otherwise be energy draining. And I can see that if you hadn't really dissected this to understand that being in nature was something that gave her energy and that meetings were something that drained her energy, she might never have arrived at that solution, right? Right. I had a young woman who said I have the trip from hell coming. up. I'm going to design that. And she didn't want to be on the road for one city a day. And when she started to look at what was energy giving, she's a huge foodie and she loves to be in the gym on the elliptical. Because when she's on the gym on the elliptical, she's also reading her Kindle, so she gets to read her romance novel. So, okay, let's design a cool restaurant in every city. It turns out she likes sitting at the bar and because then she can talk to the bartender, she doesn't feel alone and she hates being alone at a table. So, we got reservations at every bar and every city hotels with ellipticals. And she wrote us all in note and said, "Basn vise's trip of my life. It's not time management. It's design." Yeah, it's a great example. I use to have clients who many of them were young mothers and when they would come to my workshops, which were held in hotels away from where they lived, we always had nice dinners and they would be like, "I'm going to skip the dinner because I really don't care about that, but I'm going to take a bubble bath and then I'm going to have an uninterrupted night's sleep." So, that was an example of somebody who kind of dissected what it was that gave her energy or brought her back into balance or whatever it was, incorporating it into her travel experience. So, we've talked a little bit about, looking at what gives us energy and what drains us and then what we can do about it, your example of, you know, walking meetings or having meetings outside. But in your program, you actually talk about a variety of ways of dealing with this issue of energy drains and energy boosts. So, one of them is reprioritizing. So, can you talk a little bit about what that means? Well, I think people have to get in touch with what's really important to them and what's going to be really important to them is different for each person. I had many women come into the program when they had quit a job and were just starting a brand new job and they were kind of very frustrated by the fact that that brand new job was taking a ton of their time. But when you actually sit around the room and talk about it, brand new jobs always take a ton of time. There is a sunk cost to a brand new job. So, prioritize that brand new job for the next six months, time bound it and say, it is really going to be my number one priority for a while. I love your concept of time bound. I learned it from a CEO who said, you know, that test deserves about 20 good minutes of your time. And I don't think women time bound well at all. I think we do this thing where we want everything to work and be great and kind of a little bit perfectionist. And so, we give every task like way more time than it deserves. So, on my calendar, because I hate email, I have a time bound email slot. By the way, I also change my location because I've discovered in my design that if I'm doing my email in my favorite coffee shop, I feel way better. I love the concept of going someplace that you love to do this task that you don't really like. Yeah, design. Yeah. So, another thing that you suggest as a possibility to this sense of being out of balance is re-sequencing. So, what does that mean? Well, re-sequencing means that if I have four energy draining activities back to back, that is not good. And that happens usually at work, although, you know, there's women who work at home and there's, you know, activities that are draining all in a row. And so, what I say is, look, design a day where you re-sequence that. Take the activity that's energy draining for me email. I do it in the morning when I have a lot of energy. And then I stop and then I do something fun. One of the things I'm struck by here is the intentionality of all of this, which is to say that you really need to be aware of what it is that provides you with energy and what drains you, which I think for most of us, I mean, I'm going to speak for myself, I don't pay a lot of attention to, you know, it's either a good day or bad day. I don't say it was a bad day because from 1045 until 1130, I did this thing that I really didn't like and then I did something else I didn't like at lunch, right? And so, this, it seems to me like the first step in all of this is to get really conscious of, you know, what drains you and what energizes you. Absolutely. And you said it, Sarah, better than I could. When you're designing your life, what is happening is you're being very intentional and you're getting very clear about the things that are really important to you. And you're getting clear about them in different ways, right? This is an assessment that you can do, by the way, you can download the worksheets off the designing your dot live dot com website. We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, you can download the balance worksheets and the energy ones and that, you know, I think it's really important to take a little time out and just say, what are the activities I'm doing each day that give me energy and don't and just create a diary and you can start to design in a week, just try a week, just try it and see how it goes. Well, and that's the essence of design thinking, right? Is you kind of do these things assess whether or not they're working and then come back and rejigger them if that's needed. So another one of the techniques that you talk about for balancing our energy is what you call compromise and defer. What does that mean? In the book, designing your life, there's an example of a woman who decides to join a startup and she has two little children. And so she obviously makes this choice with her husband and they decide on the things that they will compromise on as she's going pretty headstrong, you know, pretty 24/7 into this startup. So one of the things that she compromises on is all of the things she was doing with her friends. And she talks about sitting down with friends and talking about, I'm not going to be able to do our book club, I'm not going to be able to do our monthly, you know, our weekly this and but what I want you to know is I love you, I want to stay in touch and I really want your support as I go through this journey and the Odyssey of a startup. And so she does not compromise on health or the relationship with her family, but she does make a compromise on some relationships with friends and, you know, outer circles. And she tells them and she defers, you know, in a year, I think I'll be back to where we were before don't give up on me, stay in touch with me, support me, this is what I'm about. And in being that intentional and that clear, the friendships don't break. In fact, they're still sustaining, people do nice things like come over with Chinese food and see how it's going. And it's just there are times in life where you're going to make a decision that one thing is more important than another. Love is more important right now. I'm in love and I'm going to concune and just be with this person I knew with and adore, right? And so the other pieces are going to kind of not be as strong. The notion that everything has to be in this perfect balance, I think, doesn't serve us well. And so, compromising defer is just being intentional about the compromises you're going to make because something again is more important right now than it's going to be in a year or two from now. You know what I'm really struck by as you tell that story is how difficult it can be, particularly I think as women, to actually face the reality of the fact that compromises need to be made. And so we make ourselves crazy because we think we're not going to make any compromises even though an outside observer would look at it and say, there's no way you can do all of these things. What are you going to downplay or what are you going to make less of a priority? And as you're telling that story, I'm thinking about that most people I know would just make themselves crazy that they weren't at their book group, right? Because their book group's important to them and not recognizing that the reality is they can't do it. Yeah, and you know, the other thing I'll say is there are times when you need to compromise at work. And if you've been a great performer, most bosses are good with that. I had a little baby and he was allergic to anything but mother's milk. That really put a cramp on as a marketing executive. I could not travel. And I sat down with my boss and said, look, nursing's really important to me. I mean, I know I have to talk about boobs to a man. It's very hard. And you know, nursing's important to me. This is what I want to do. I need six months and then I can be back on the road. He was fine with that because there had been this give and take of a relationship where I had gone above and beyond for many years. And he's like, that do you need to do? Right. The other thing I'm struck by is just the role that communication has in all of this, which is to be really clear with other people. I mean, the first thing is to get clear with yourself, but then to get clear with other people about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Yeah. Okay. So, So first of all, I highly recommend anybody who's interested in this topic that they participate in one of your workshops. But what's one action step that you would encourage our listeners to take? We know in the next week or two to implement some of these important lessons about balancing energy. What you do is every day you write down those things that give you energy, those things that drain you and sort of what was the highlight of your day. And if you keep a journal like that and do it for 10, 15 days and then look back on it, you can get some real insight into what you need more of in your life, what you need less of because somethings you can just delete, frankly. And if you can't delete it, how can you sequence your days or weeks to be a little bit more joyful and more energy giving and quote more balanced, right, at peace with your priorities? I think the other thing is to get really clear about what those priorities are right now. And they will be different for every person. And you have to do this a lot in life, especially at inflection points when things change and we know life is about change because those priorities will change. And that's why Sarah, I love what you said. Communication is so important because what has been going along and working suddenly will shift because your priorities have changed and you got to speak it out to people because they're going to still have the expectations of what you were doing before. That sounds terrific and as she said, doesn't need to take a lot of time. Susan, you've shared so much wisdom with us and so many great ideas about how we can redesign our days and our weeks to have them be more satisfying and fulfilling. So thanks so much for being with us today. Well, thanks for asking me. It was fun. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Susan. And I hope you'll take her up on her suggestion to analyze what parts of your days give you energy in which parts drain you and to think of ways that you can create a day that works better for you. And if you have a friend who you think might enjoy hearing Susan's advice about designing your day rather than managing your time, please share this episode with her. I bet she'll appreciate it. And if you'd like to go deeper on this approach to designing your life, Susan's next all women designing your life retreat is being held on July 27th and 28th in San Diego and October 5th and 6th in New York. Information about the program is listed in the show notes. And finally, if you'd like even more great career and enhancing advice, remember to sign up for my monthly newsletter at tomyyounger.me and follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn at tomyyounger.me, where I share even more great career and enhancing advice. Thanks for listening and until next time, I'm Sarah Holtz.