Design your life worksheet: Free template and session guide

Key takeaways

The design your life worksheet is a Stanford-built self-assessment tool that helps clients clarify values, weigh options, and choose a next step.

Seven exercises make up the pack, running from workview and lifeview reflections through to odyssey plans and prototype conversations.

Most practitioners run the full sequence over six to eight weeks, assigning one exercise between each session.

Therapists, coaches, academic advisors, and occupational therapists use it for career changes, life balance, and post-injury role transitions.

Practice management software like Pabau files the finished worksheet on the client record and chases the clients who have not returned it.

A design your life worksheet is a structured self-assessment tool that helps someone clarify their values, weigh their options, and plan a change. The framework behind it comes from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, two Stanford design professors. They applied design-thinking principles to life planning.

This guide walks through every section of the worksheet and shows how to run the seven exercises with clients. It also covers where each exercise fits in a course of sessions.

What is the Designing Your Life framework?

The Designing Your Life framework is a life-planning method that borrows the tools designers use on hard problems. It grew out of a Stanford University course taught by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, design professors and co-founders of the Life Design Lab.

Rather than prescribing one correct path, it asks people to design several possible futures and then test them. Five principles hold the method together:

• Stay curious about your own life.
• Reframe the problem as a design challenge.
• Accept that no single answer is the right one.
• Prototype a possibility before committing to it.
• Pay attention to how your life is unfolding.

Stanford’s Life Design Lab still runs courses and research on the approach. That makes it one of the better-evidenced frameworks for career and life transitions.

The seven exercises at a glance

The pack holds seven exercises that build on each other. Clients usually work through them in order, though practitioners reshuffle them to suit whatever the client walked in with.

• Workview and lifeview: short written reflections on what work means and what life means to the client.
• Good Time Journal: a one- to two-week log of activities, energy, and engagement.
• Work, play, love, health dashboard: four gauges rating balance across those domains.
• Mind map: a visual sweep of skills, interests, and useful connections.
• Odyssey plan: three alternative five-year futures, sketched side by side.
• Prototype conversations: interview guides for testing a path against someone already living it.
• Action plan: the concrete next steps that come out of the other six.

1. Workview and lifeview reflections

Workview asks what work is for. Why do people work, and what makes a job worth doing? Lifeview asks the same kind of question about purpose, relationships, and what a good life looks like.

Clients write freely for 15 to 20 minutes on each prompt, without editing as they go. The result usually surfaces a core value, or an assumption they borrowed from someone else and never questioned. When the answers keep circling back to a partner, a couples therapy worksheet is often the better next step.

A client portal lets them write between sessions and send the file over securely beforehand. You then read the reflections before the session instead of listening to them read aloud.

2. The Good Time Journal

The Good Time Journal is a daily log kept for one or two weeks. Clients record what they did, how much energy it took, and how engaged they felt.

Each activity then gets plotted on a simple two-by-two grid. High energy plus high engagement is the target. Low energy with low engagement is what to design out of the week.

Two weeks of entries beat a client’s memory of a good month. When the odyssey plans arrive, you have their own data to point at.

3. The four-gauge dashboard for work, play, love, and health

Balance is rarely even across the four domains. Clients rate their satisfaction with work, play, love, and health on a zero-to-10 scale. Drawn as four gauges, the imbalance shows up at a glance.

A client might put work at 8 and love at 4. That reading is the conversation. What would move love from 4 to 6, and is now the right moment to try?

Naming the trade-off out loud is the part that matters. A client who decides to leave love at 4 for another year has still made a choice rather than drifted.

4. Mind mapping skills and interests

Mind mapping puts a client’s skills, interests, and contacts on one page. They start from a central node, usually themselves, and branch outward. What am I good at? What holds my attention? Who do I already know in a field I am curious about?

The value sits in the unexpected pairing. Someone drawn to both marine biology and design might land on science education or environmental campaigning. The map moves the question from which job to apply for to which combinations are open.

5. Odyssey plans: Designing three possible futures

The odyssey plan asks for three distinct five-year futures. Plan A continues the current path. Plan B assumes that path closed tomorrow. Plan C ignores money and other people’s opinions entirely.

For each one, the client sketches a typical week, the skills they would need, and the people around them. Three plans on the table remove the pressure of picking one path forever. Most clients end up combining pieces of two.

6. Prototype conversations

Prototype conversations are structured informational interviews. The client prepares open questions, then talks to someone already living the option they are weighing up. What does a typical day look like? What surprised you? What would you do differently?

The worksheet supplies the question set, which turns a vague idea into a concrete picture. Wanting to work at a nonprofit becomes knowing what a nonprofit program manager does all day. That grounding is what takes the risk out of a big decision.

7. Action plan

Work together on an action plan that will synthesize the six exercises you went though during this period. This plan should incorporate lessons learned in the prior period and set your client on his path forward.

Running the full sequence over eight weeks

Each exercise stands on its own, but they land harder in order. A typical engagement runs six to eight weeks:

1. Week 1: workview and lifeview reflections, to set the philosophical ground.
2. Weeks 2 to 3: daily Good Time Journal entries, reviewed together at the next session.
3. Week 3: the four-gauge dashboard, to surface where balance has slipped.
4. Week 4: a mind map of skills, interests, and contacts.
5. Weeks 5 to 6: three odyssey plans, then a discussion of the trade-offs.
6. Weeks 6 to 7: two or three prototype conversations based on the most appealing future.
7. Week 8: an action plan with dates against each step.

Paper worksheets mean chasing people. Digital forms come back filled in, so you read the answers before the session rather than during it.

Who the design your life worksheet is for

The worksheet is not only for career counseling. Different practitioners reach for it with different client groups:

• Therapists and psychologists: clients in transition, or stuck on questions of meaning. A coping skills worksheet handles the week, and this one handles the year.
• Career coaches: career changers, recent graduates, and professionals reassessing direction after burnout.
• Academic advisors: students weighing majors, internships, and what happens after graduation.
• Life coaches and wellness practitioners: development work framed around the four-gauge balance model. A habit tracker keeps the action plan visible afterward.
• Occupational therapists: clients rebuilding routines after injury, often alongside an occupational performance measure.

Where you start depends on what the client brings through the door.

Any practitioner whose clients are asking what comes next can use it. The worksheet is a conversation tool that supports therapeutic or coaching work rather than a treatment in itself.

Fitting the framework into your practice

Set expectations at the start. Explain what each exercise is for, how long it takes, and how the answers feed into the next session. Some practitioners assign the worksheets as homework, while others fill them in together during the hour.

The framework sits alongside clinical assessment rather than replacing it. Automated reminders keep the worksheets moving and cut no-shows for the sessions where you review them. Client compliance climbs when nobody has to remember a task on their own.

A client’s written reflections are sensitive material. Before you send them to another provider, get written authorization on file, which is what a HIPAA release form is for.

Group programs need a different rhythm. Coaching practices often run the odyssey plan as a workshop, then book individual sessions for the prototype conversations.

How Pabau keeps life design work moving between sessions

Most practices run this on paper and email. The worksheet goes out as a PDF attachment and comes back as a photo of a page. It then sits in a folder nobody opens before the next session.

Practice management software like Pabau sends the worksheet as a digital form and files the completed answers straight onto the client record. Automated workflows chase whoever has not filled it in, so you are not sending manual nudges on a Sunday night.

During the session, Pabau Scribe, our AI scribe, writes the notes while you talk. The odyssey plan discussion lands in the record with the dashboard scores beside it.

That helps whether you run a therapy practice or a coaching business. Six weeks later you can see which exercises the client finished, what they scored, and what they committed to.

Keep every worksheet on the client record

Pabau sends life design worksheets as digital forms, files the answers on the client record, and reminds clients who have not finished. You spend the session on the conversation instead of the admin.

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Conclusion

The worksheet earns its place because it gives a stuck client something to do. Reflection on its own rarely moves anyone. Three drafted futures and two conversations with people living them usually do.

The trade-off is time. Eight weeks of homework asks a lot of someone who came in wanting an answer this month. Say so up front, and pick the two or three exercises that fit the presenting question if the full sequence is too much.

Download the template above, decide where it sits in your session structure, and hand it to the next client who feels stuck. Book a demo to see how Pabau keeps completed worksheets, session notes, and follow-up reminders in one place.

Continue your research

Need a structure for session notes? Coach notebook template gives you a repeatable format for recording goals and agreed actions after each session.

Onboarding a new coaching client? Life coach intake form collects background, goals, and commitment before the first life design conversation.

Working with a client who has lost hope? Herth Hope Index measures hope as a baseline before you start designing futures together.

Client too distressed for long-range planning? Distress tolerance skills worksheet covers the immediate coping work that has to come first.

Want better engagement between sessions? Patient communication covers the messaging habits that keep clients replying and turning up.

Frequently asked questions