New
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Pages
401
Published
2021
Career Growth
✨ New
Designing Your New Work Life
How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work
Apply design thinking to your career so you can reshape your work life into one that actually fits you — starting where you are right now.
Burnett and Evans, the Stanford professors behind the bestselling Designing Your Life, turn their attention to readers already in the workforce. Using the same design-thinking framework, they offer practical tools for prototyping new roles, navigating workplace dysfunction, managing your boss, and building a career that aligns with who you are now — not who you were when you first took the job.
About this book
Most career books assume you are at a crossroads: unemployed, miserable, or starting from scratch. Designing Your New Work Life assumes something closer to the truth: you have a job, it mostly works, but something is off. Maybe the role has drifted. Maybe your priorities have changed. Maybe the organization around you has shifted and you have not figured out how to shift with it.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans bring the design-thinking methodology they developed at Stanford's Life Design Lab directly into the workplace. Their approach treats your career not as a fixed path to optimize but as a prototype to iterate. You do not need a dramatic pivot. You need a set of tools for noticing what is not working, generating options, and testing small changes before committing to big ones.
The book maps the full landscape of work problems — from bad bosses and toxic cultures to boredom, burnout, and the creeping sense that you have outgrown your role — and gives you concrete reframes and exercises for each. It covers:
- Identifying your workview and lifeview so your career decisions reflect your actual values
- Prototyping new roles and responsibilities without quitting your current job
- Managing up effectively when your boss is the obstacle
- Navigating dysfunctional teams and difficult colleagues with less friction
- Building a community of peers who support your growth rather than compete with it
- Knowing when a situation is genuinely fixable and when it is time to leave
Burnett and Evans write for people who want to think clearly about their work lives without the pressure of wholesale reinvention. The exercises are short, the frameworks are memorable, and the underlying message is practical: good work life design is an ongoing practice, not a one-time decision.
Whether you are a decade into a career that no longer excites you, navigating a post-pandemic workplace that looks nothing like the one you signed up for, or simply trying to get more of your best work out the door each week, this book gives you a repeatable process for making your work life better — starting from exactly where you are.
🎯 What you'll learn
- Apply design thinking principles to diagnose what is actually broken in your current work life
- Prototype new roles, responsibilities, or working arrangements without leaving your job
- Articulate your workview and lifeview so your career decisions align with your real priorities
- Manage a difficult boss or dysfunctional team using specific, tested strategies
- Distinguish between problems worth solving inside your current situation and problems that signal it is time to move on
- Build a professional community that actively supports your growth
- Reframe setbacks and transitions as design data rather than failures
👤 Who is this book for?
- Professionals who feel stuck in a role that used to fit but no longer does
- Managers and individual contributors trying to navigate organizational change without derailing their careers
- Anyone who read Designing Your Life and wants to apply the same framework to their current job
- People experiencing burnout or low engagement who are not sure whether to stay or leave
- Early- and mid-career workers who want a structured process for making intentional career decisions
- Coaches and HR professionals looking for a practical framework to share with the people they support
Table of contents
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01
Your Work Life Is Broken — and That Is Okay
Burnett and Evans introduce the design-thinking lens and explain why treating your career as a prototype rather than a fixed plan leads to better outcomes. You assess your current work life across four dimensions: workload, engagement, energy, and flow.
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02
Workview and Lifeview
You articulate your personal workview — why you work and what work is for — alongside your broader lifeview. Aligning these two frameworks helps you make career decisions grounded in your actual values rather than external expectations.
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03
The Good Time Journal at Work
You track your daily work activities to identify which tasks drain you and which produce engagement and flow. The data you collect becomes the raw material for redesigning your role from the inside.
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04
Designing Your Days
Using insights from your Good Time Journal, you prototype small changes to how you structure your workday. The chapter covers practical techniques for protecting your best hours and reducing low-value work.
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05
Managing Your Boss and Your Organization
You learn concrete strategies for working with difficult managers, navigating organizational politics, and communicating your needs without damaging key relationships. The chapter reframes the boss-management problem as a design challenge with real solutions.
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06
Navigating Dysfunction
You examine the most common forms of workplace dysfunction — toxic culture, unclear expectations, poor communication — and apply design thinking to determine which are worth addressing and which are structural and unlikely to change.
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07
Designing Your Dream Job Inside Your Current Job
You prototype new responsibilities, projects, and working relationships within your existing role to move toward work that better fits who you are now. The chapter introduces job crafting as a design practice.
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08
Building Your Team
You identify the professional community you need — mentors, peers, collaborators — and learn how to build and sustain it intentionally. The chapter distinguishes between networking as transaction and community as genuine mutual support.
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09
Knowing When to Stay and When to Go
You apply a structured decision framework to evaluate whether your current situation is fixable or whether a genuine transition is the better design choice. The chapter helps you make that call with clarity rather than panic or inertia.
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10
An Ongoing Practice
Burnett and Evans close by framing good work life design as a continuous habit rather than a one-time fix. You leave with a repeatable process for revisiting and adjusting your work life as your circumstances and priorities evolve.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to have read Designing Your Life first?
No. This book stands on its own. Familiarity with the earlier book is helpful but not required — the core design-thinking framework is reintroduced clearly here.
Is this book aimed at people who want to change careers entirely?
Not primarily. The book is aimed at people who already have a job and want to improve, reshape, or better understand their current work life. It does address transitions, but wholesale career change is not the main focus.
Does the book include exercises I can actually do, or is it mostly theory?
The book is heavily exercise-driven. Each chapter includes short, practical activities — journaling prompts, mapping exercises, and prototyping frameworks — that you can complete in under an hour.
Is this relevant if I work remotely or in a hybrid setup?
Yes. The 2021 edition was updated to address post-pandemic workplace realities, including remote work, distributed teams, and the blurred boundaries between work and home life.
Who is this book not for?
It is less useful if you are a student choosing a first career path — the companion book Designing Your Life addresses that audience more directly. It also assumes you have some degree of agency in your role.
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