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
305
Published
2020
Career Growth
✨ New
Designing Your Work Life
How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work
Apply design thinking to your actual job so you can build a career that fits the life you want — not the one you fell into.
From the Stanford professors behind Designing Your Life comes a focused, practical follow-up that puts design thinking to work on the job you have right now. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show you how to reframe what isn't working, identify what you actually want from work, and make deliberate changes — whether that means crafting your current role, navigating a difficult boss, or deciding when it's time to leave.
About this book
Most career advice tells you to find your passion or climb the ladder faster. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans take a different approach: treat your work life as a design problem. That means prototyping solutions, reframing constraints, and making iterative changes instead of waiting for a perfect opportunity that never arrives.
Designing Your Work Life picks up where Designing Your Life left off. Instead of starting from scratch, it focuses on the job you already have — the daily frustrations, the misaligned responsibilities, the manager who doesn't see your potential, the work that drains you, and the parts that actually matter. The book gives you a structured way to understand what's broken and a set of tools to fix it, one experiment at a time.
Burnett and Evans draw on years of teaching Stanford's most popular course and coaching thousands of working professionals. They know that most people can't just quit and start over. So the book addresses the real situations you face: how to job-craft your current role so it plays to your strengths, how to have an honest conversation with a difficult boss, how to build a team of advisors who give you real feedback, and how to know — with clarity rather than anxiety — when it's genuinely time to move on.
The authors are rigorous about one thing: this is not a self-help book about attitude. Every chapter ends with a concrete exercise. You'll map your energy, audit your time, prototype alternative versions of your current job, and build the skill of reframing problems before you react to them. The tools are borrowed from product design and tested against real careers.
- Job-craft your existing role to align daily work with what energizes you
- Reframe the stuck points that feel permanent but aren't
- Navigate a bad boss using tested conversation frameworks
- Decide rationally — not emotionally — when to stay or leave
- Build a personal board of advisors who provide honest, useful input
- Prototype small changes before committing to a large career move
Whether you feel stuck, burned out, underused, or simply unsure what you want next, this book gives you a repeatable process for making your work life better — starting with what you have today.
🎯 What you'll learn
- Apply design thinking tools — reframing, prototyping, mind-mapping — directly to your current job situation
- Identify which parts of your work drain you and which parts energize you using a structured energy audit
- Job-craft your existing role to shift your responsibilities toward work that fits your strengths
- Navigate a difficult boss by choosing the right conversation strategy for your specific situation
- Evaluate whether to stay or leave a job using a rational decision framework rather than gut anxiety
- Build a personal board of advisors who provide honest, actionable feedback on your career
- Prototype alternative versions of your current job before committing to a major change
- Reframe career problems that feel permanent into solvable design challenges
👤 Who is this book for?
- Professionals who feel stuck in their current role and want a structured way to figure out what to change first
- Managers and individual contributors who have read Designing Your Life and want to apply the same framework to their day-to-day job
- People considering a career change who want to exhaust their options before making a costly leap
- Anyone dealing with a difficult manager or team dynamic and looking for practical frameworks rather than generic advice
- Early- to mid-career professionals who want to be intentional about the next five years instead of reactive
- HR leaders and coaches who want a credible, well-researched framework to recommend to employees navigating career transitions
Table of contents
-
01
You Are Here
Establishes the design thinking mindset and explains why treating your work life as a prototype — rather than a fixed outcome — changes how you approach problems. You'll complete a baseline assessment of where you stand today.
-
02
Getting Unstuck
Introduces the reframing tool and shows you how to tell the difference between a problem you can design around and a gravity problem you can't. You'll identify your most pressing stuck point and reframe it into an actionable question.
-
03
The Good Enough Job
Challenges the cultural myth that your job should be your calling and offers a more useful definition of a good enough job. You'll assess your current role against practical criteria that actually predict satisfaction.
-
04
Crafting Your Job
Teaches job-crafting as a deliberate skill: how to reshape tasks, relationships, and purpose within your existing role. You'll map your current responsibilities and prototype a redesigned version of your job.
-
05
The Energy Audit
Guides you through a structured audit of how you spend your time and which activities drain or restore your energy. You'll build a clear picture of where your daily work is misaligned with what sustains you.
-
06
Navigating a Difficult Boss
Provides a typology of difficult managers and a set of tested conversation frameworks for each. You'll choose the right approach for your situation and plan a specific next step.
-
07
Building Your Team
Explains how to identify and cultivate a personal board of advisors who give you real feedback rather than polite reassurance. You'll audit your current network and identify the gaps.
-
08
Knowing When to Leave
Offers a rational framework for deciding whether to stay in or leave your current job, separating temporary frustrations from structural mismatches. You'll work through the decision using the same prototyping tools applied to your role.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to have read Designing Your Life first?
No. Designing Your Work Life stands on its own. It borrows the same design thinking vocabulary, but the authors reintroduce every concept you need. Readers who have read the first book will find the framework familiar, but it isn't a prerequisite.
Is this book aimed at people who want to change careers entirely?
Not exclusively. The majority of the book addresses how to improve the job you already have through job-crafting, energy audits, and reframing. A later chapter does address when leaving is the right call, but that's one part of a broader toolkit.
Is this more of a workbook or a narrative read?
Both. Each chapter contains narrative explanation and real examples, followed by concrete exercises you complete for your own situation. You'll get more out of it if you actually do the exercises rather than reading straight through.
Is the advice relevant if I work in a non-corporate setting, such as education or the nonprofit sector?
Yes. The frameworks are role- and industry-agnostic. The authors draw examples from a wide range of work contexts, and the core tools — reframing, prototyping, energy audits — apply regardless of sector.
How current is the content given it was published in 2020?
The core framework is based on design thinking principles that don't date quickly. Structural topics like remote work and evolving workplace dynamics were emerging at publication time, so some specific examples may feel dated, but the tools themselves remain applicable.
You might also like
New
New
New
The Squiggly Career
A practical guide to navigating a non-linear career with confidence and clarity
2020
View →
New