Designing Your Life Worksheets

How to Actually Use the Designing Your Life Worksheets Without Wasting Afternoon

The Stanford d.school created these worksheets as part of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans' book. The core idea is that you treat your life like a design problem: prototype options instead of overthinking decisions, run small experiments, and iterate. Most people open the pack and stare at a blank "Odyssey Plan" for twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing because they don't know where to start. That's the first failure point. Here's how I actually use them. You can grab the free PDF versions from the official Bookworm site or from a few reputable third-party resellers. The Stanford d.school itself has released many of the core sheets openly. I print them on plain paper, one worksheet per page, and work through them with a pen. Digital fill-in forms exist but they encourage scrolling and editing endlessly. Paper forces you to commit something before moving on.

Getting Started With Designing Your Life Worksheets

Start with the "Odyssey Plan" sheet. You write three different five-year versions of your life. Not three career options inside the same life. Three entirely different lives. Version A is what you're currently on track for. Version B is what you'd do if Version A disappeared overnight. Version C is the one you'd try if money and other people's opinions were completely removed from the equation. People mess this up by making all three versions too similar. You'll end up with "consultant in Chicago," "consultant in Denver," and "freelance consultant somewhere warm." That's not three lives. That's one life with zip code variations. Force yourself into genuinely different directions. If you can't, you're still thinking in career-ladder terms instead of life-design terms. Spend at least forty-five minutes on this sheet alone. Don't rush it. After the Odyssey Plan comes the "Good Time Journal." This is where most beginners quit because it feels vague. It's not. You track activities across two dimensions: when you lose track of time (flow state) and when you drain your energy noticeably. You do this for one full week. Every day, jot down the hours that fit each category. At the end of seven days you'll have data. Not opinions. Actual data about what your nervous system responds to when you're not filtering it through whatever narrative you tell yourself about your job or your hobbies.

The "Compass" worksheet asks you to rate five domains on a scale and then draw arrows showing where you want each to move. Work, Health, Love, Play, and Wellness. Most people rate themselves honestly and then immediately abandon the exercise because the mismatch between where they are and where they want to be feels uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. Stay with it for ten minutes. Write down one specific action for the domain with the biggest gap. One action. Not a resolution. A single observable step you could take within two weeks. I ran into a specific problem last year that the worksheets don't really address head-on. Someone going through a major life transition—say, a layoff, a divorce, or moving to a new country—finds that the Odyssey Plan's five-year framing becomes almost impossible to fill out meaningfully. Five years feels either absurdly far away or completely irrelevant when you're in survival mode. My workaround was simple: I compressed the timeframe. Instead of five-year Odyssey Plans, I did six-month "sprints." What would a version of my life look like in six months under three different conditions? It produced more actionable output than any five-year exercise ever has for me during unstable periods. The structure stays the same. Only the horizon shifts. There are other worksheets in the pack. The "Bias Catcher" helps you identify cognitive distortions before they hijack a decision. The "Hacks" sheet is for generating low-cost, low-risk experiments you can run to test a direction without committing to it. The "Joy List" is a inventory of things that consistently make you feel engaged. Use the Joy List when you're stuck on the Odyssey Plan. Cross-reference your three versions against activities already on the Joy List. If none of them overlap, at least one version is likely fantasy rather than grounded design.

Here's something beginners consistently miss: these worksheets are not a planning tool. They're a sensemaking tool. The difference matters. A planning tool assumes you know the destination and are figuring out the route. The design framework assumes you don't know the destination and are using structured exploration to narrow possibilities. If you approach the Odyssey Plan as "here are three career paths I'm considering," you're using it wrong. Approach it as "here are three possible versions of a life I might live, and I'm trying to figure out which one feels worth investigating further." The mental posture changes everything about how you fill it out. Another counter-intuitive point: do the worksheets in order but don't treat them as sequential. The Good Time Journal and the Odyssey Plan feed each other. Do them roughly in parallel over a couple of weeks. Let the journal entries inform what you write in the Odyssey Plan. Let the Odyssey Plan highlight gaps in what the journal is telling you. They're designed to be iterative, not linear. Treating them as a checklist produces shallow results. The main limitation nobody talks about is that this method assumes a baseline of agency. If you're dealing with systemic constraints—financial instability, caretaking obligations, immigration status, health crises—the worksheets can feel insulting. You can't prototype a life where you move to another country if you literally cannot leave your current city. You can't explore a six-month sprint if you're working three jobs to pay rent. The framework isn't broken in these cases. It's just not the right tool. In those situations, the "Compass" worksheet with a compressed timeline and the "Hacks" sheet for micro-experiments are about as useful as you're going to get. Sometimes journaling freely without any structure is more valuable than filling out a grid.

If you decide these worksheets aren't working for you after a genuine attempt, that's data too. Note what frustrated you and move on. The process is supposed to be experimental. Testing whether the process itself fits your situation is a valid outcome of using it. The official worksheets are available for free at the Bookworm website (bookworm.com). Third-party printable versions circulate on sites like Canva and various design blogs, but I'd stick to the originals. The layout, spacing, and prompt wording matter more than you'd expect. Minor redesigns on fan-made versions tend to shift the cognitive framing enough to produce slightly worse results. I've seen it happen with teams running workshops. The original PDFs are the benchmark. Spend about two to three weeks working through the full set if you want the intended experience. Anything faster than that turns it into a journaling exercise with extra steps. The value is in the iteration, not the completion.