So, it’s been about a month since I started looking at my life as a research project. It’s a daunting thing, because my life is full of all kinds of different aspects, so where do you even start with figuring out how to make it into whatever its ideal state is? What is ideal, anyway?
Luckily, I am no stranger to exploratory research! This is how I started.
Research
Naturally, I started off with a list of questions I wanted to ask about myself as I am now and what I think would make me happy. I put a couple questions down, each on a separate sheet of paper, and left them by where I eat (When I don’t eat at my desk) so that I could answer them when I was taking some down time during the day. I left some fun pens so and did this over the course of two weeks so I could do this when I was having different kinds of day and in different moods with different perspectives.
The questions I started with were:
- What does is an ideal life?
- What is a perfect day?
- What do I like?
There were others, but these were the ones I found were the most useful.
Finding trends
At the end of the two weeks, I wrote all of the things I wrote down onto post it notes1 and started to group the ideas together.
You may notice that there are a lot of things that fall between groups. That is pretty normal, but I didn’t force these ones into one group or another. Sometimes one thing is meaningful for many things!
From these groups, I could figure out a series of areas of life that I found important. For me this is:
- Environment
- Experiences
- Physical health
- Mental health
- Day to day
- Creative freedom
- Money
- Relationships
- Pets
Next steps
I also came up with a few initial next steps we can cover in the coming months:
- Refining the areas
- Determining the current status of these areas
- Finding metrics
- Creating some hypotheses
- In Miro, because I am in tech and for whatever reason tech companies always seem to use Miro these days [↩]