Designing Your New Work Life

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life comes a revised, fully up-to-date edition of Designing Your New Work Life, a timely, urgently needed book that shows us how to transform our new uncharted work life into a meaningful dream job or company. With practical, useful tools, tips, and design ideas that show us how to navigate disruption (global, regional, or personal) and create new possibilities for our post-COVID work world and beyond.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life (“The prototype for a happy life.” —Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don’t analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward. And now more than ever, we all need creative and adaptable tools to cope with the chaos caused by COVID-19.

In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job, and how it can improve our experience of work in times of disruption. All disruption is personal, write Burnett and Evans, as with the life-altering global pandemic we are living through now. Designing Your New Work Life makes clear that disruption is the new normal, that it is here to stay and that it is accelerating. And in the book’s new chapters, Burnett and Evans show us step by step, how to design our way through disruption and how to stay ahead of it—and thrive.

Burnett and Evans’s Disruption Design offers us a radical new concept that makes use of the designer mindsets: Curiosity, Reframing, Radical collaboration, Awareness, Bias to action, Storytelling, to find our way through these unchartered times.

In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us, with tools, tips, and design ideas, how we can make new possibilities available even when our lives have been disrupted (be it globally, regionally, or personally), giving us the tools to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype our possible future.

*Includes a downloadable PDF of charts and worksheets from the book