How to Create Your Life By Design
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Just back from a long weekend. My partner Gillian Brookes and I spent two solid days creating our ‘life by design’ plan for the next 15 months or so. Call us geeks? Sure! But man, what an energising thing to do. Buzzing from what we’ve created together.
Here’s how we rolled:
Friday afternoon, driving to our accommodation: checking in with each other on how we are going as a couple.
Friday evening, over a long, relaxed dinner at the local pub: reflecting on the past twelve months. Sharing and remembering highlights, lowlights, lessons learned, and insights gleaned.
Saturday morning (early-ish): writing separately on post-it notes what we want for our lives. Dreams, hopes, intentions. Then sharing our ideas before clustering them into themes (e.g., travel & adventure, financial, health and wellbeing, etc).
Saturday morning (later): mapping any date-dependent dreams across a visual timeline from October 2025 through to December 2026 (with a section for ‘later than that’). Then time for some more post-it notes: ideas for actions we’d need to take to make our ideas happen.
Saturday lunch: off to another country pub followed by a big ol’ walk in the bush. Deep diving and exploring all sorts of ideas.
Saturday late afternoon: putting our goals down on a month-by-month calendar. This is Reality Check Number 1: What can we actually fit in? What space do we want to keep wide open?
Saturday evening: let go and chill.
Sunday morning: exploring our short and long-term financial goals, getting out the spreadsheet, and updating our budget. This is Reality Check Number 2: What can we actually afford? What do we want to afford?
Sunday late morning: capturing all the main ideas on one page, deciding what we’ll action now and how we’ll stay on track.
Sunday lunch: off to another pub!
Some reflections on this whole idea:
👉 Why a life-by-design plan? If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. We both reckon it’s better to create your future intentionally than just to float along.
👉 Why now? It’s only October! We’ve found that if we leave it to January, the year gets away from you quickly. Doing it now gives us a nice, long taxiway into next year, and we can tweak as we go.
👉 What happens if I/we do this? Speaking personally, decisions become easier because we know the game we want to play. We know we’ve made space for the important stuff, as well as space for the unexpected and spontaneous. We can create support structures and plans more purposefully because we know more clearly what we want. We feel more intentional, more deliberate, and more alive. We feel like we’re even more of a team. We’re in this together and, well, that’s just a great feeling!
Food for thought? I hope so. Food for action? Even better!
So, where can you go from here? Here are a couple of things you can do:
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