I'm a UX designer by trade, but my greatest design project is my life. I actively create and guide it — setting goals, building structures to support them, and continually learning. I don't set resolutions. I make an actionable list with real steps.
This might sound like productivity advice, and some of it is. But underneath the tactics is something I care about more: the belief that you have agency over your own life, that it can be designed rather than just lived, and that the same rigor you'd bring to a complex product problem is exactly the rigor your life deserves.
Start with motivation, not method
Every goal starts with a reason. Not "I should work out more" but "I want to be healthier in my body." Not "I should write" but "making time to learn and create is one of my favorite things, and I keep letting it slip." You need to understand your own motivation clearly, because method without motivation is just a system that eventually collapses.
Once the motivation is real, the approach is simpler than it sounds: take a black and white view of your commitments. If your goal is to not eat sweets on weekdays, then when someone offers you a cookie on a Tuesday, the decision is already made. Rules you've pre-committed to remove the friction of in-the-moment negotiation with yourself.
Think in two timescales
I find it most useful to hold two timescales at once. The first is a long horizon — a loose bucket list of what I want to have done, seen, or become. Not a deadline, but a direction. The second is an annual plan: concrete goals with real deadlines, shaped by that longer horizon.
The long-horizon list gives you permission to dream without constraint. The annual plan forces you to actually start. Without the long view, annual goals can feel arbitrary. Without the short view, big dreams stay abstract forever.
Both matter. The trick is moving fluidly between them — using the annual review to ask which small steps this year close the gap between where I am and where I want to be.
Build structures, not willpower
The least reliable tool for accomplishing goals is willpower. The most reliable is structure — removing the conditions under which you'd fail.
One of the most effective structures I've built is simply waking up earlier. I started by setting my alarm 30 minutes before I needed to be anywhere, and I used that time to write or work out. The house was quiet. There were no competing demands. The goal didn't require motivation in the moment because the structure made it automatic.
Think about where you usually derail. Is it time? Energy? Access? Then design around it. Move the cello from the office to the living room. Take the cookies off your desk. Put your workout gear out the night before. The principle is simple: put the things you want to do in your line of sight, and move the things that work against you out of reach.
Surround yourself with the right people
The people around you shape what feels possible. This isn't abstract — it's concrete. An accountability partner, someone you check in with every two weeks, radically changes whether you follow through. Not because of guilt, but because the relationship creates a container for your commitments.
Beyond accountability, think about which people in your life expand your sense of what's possible. After I moved from the Midwest to New York for grad school, a friend was inspired to reconsider her own assumptions about where she could live. She and her husband moved to San Francisco. We still inspire each other to take risks. Those relationships are worth tending.
Set up your environment to do the work for you
Your environment is either working for your goals or against them. Most of the time we just haven't looked at it clearly.
The same logic that makes good UX work — reducing friction, surfacing what matters, hiding what doesn't — applies directly here. A kitchen cleared of food that doesn't fit how you want to eat is easier to cook in. A workspace organized around what you're actually trying to do makes starting automatic.
This is one of the underrated pleasures of designing your life deliberately: you start seeing your home, your calendar, your routines as a system you can adjust. Nothing is fixed. Everything is a variable.
Start now, anywhere
Goals don't require January. They don't require a perfect plan. They require a decision and a first step.
What I've found, over years of doing this, is that the real benefit isn't any single goal accomplished — it's the compounding effect of believing you have agency over your own life. You set a goal, you accomplish it, and something shifts. You start seeing possibility where you used to see constraint. You realize that the shape of your life is, to a meaningful degree, something you're designing whether you know it or not.
You might as well do it on purpose.
Originally published February 15, 2015.