How Is Your Life Actually Going?

You can be busy, successful, and doing fine on paper, and still have a quiet feeling that something is off. Usually it is because one whole area of your life has slowly gone empty while you were not looking at it. You were measuring the wrong things, so you never saw it drop.

I have been thinking about this because of a book, and it led me to build something small that I am giving away for free.

The reading before the redesign

The book is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They are the Stanford designers who took the way good products get built and pointed it at something bigger, which is how you build an actual life. If you have not read it, go read it. This whole post is really just me recommending it with extra steps.

One idea stuck with me and would not leave. Before you try to redesign anything, you take a reading of where you actually are. They do it with a simple gauge across four areas: Health, Work, Play, and Love. Not a score anyone else sees. Just an honest reading of how full each of those tanks feels right now.

Here is why that hit me. I measure all kinds of things. Revenue. Pipeline. Steps. None of them tell me whether my life is actually going well, because a life is not one number. It is at least those four, and most of us never check the gauges. We just drive until one of them is empty and the warning light comes on, which is usually a lot later than we would like.

So I built the gauge

I wanted to take that reading for myself, once a month, and watch the trend over time instead of guessing. I looked for a dead-simple, private, free way to do it, and I could not find one I liked. So I did the thing engineers do when they cannot find the tool. I built it.

It is called Designing Your Life, after the book that inspired it, and it is free. You rate the four areas once a month, either on your own or with an AI coach that walks you through it if you want the prompts. It saves your readings and shows you the trend, so you can see the slow drift you would otherwise miss. It is private, and your household can share the space while each person keeps their own dashboard. That is the whole thing. It is not trying to be a social network or sell you a course. It is a gauge.

I built it on Cloudflare, it costs me almost nothing to run, and it is free for you to use. It will stay free.

The honest footnotes

Two things I want to say plainly.

First, credit. The idea is not mine. It belongs to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans and their book. My little app is an unofficial, free companion made by a fan of their work. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by them or by Stanford, and if you only take one thing from this post, buy the book, not my tool (official site, Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

Second, the point is the reading, not the app. You do not need my software to do this. You can take your four gauges on a napkin tonight. I built the app because I wanted the trend line over months, and because tracking a thing is how I actually keep doing it. If a spreadsheet works better for you, use the spreadsheet. The habit is what matters.

What to do this week

1. Take your first reading. Health, Work, Play, Love. Rate each one, one to ten, honestly, right now. Two minutes.
2. Notice which number surprised you. It is almost always one. That surprise is the whole reason to measure.
3. Do one small thing for the lowest one. Not a life overhaul. One walk, one call, one evening off. You are steering, not rebuilding.
4. Come back in a month and read the gauges again. The trend is where the truth is.

If you want the tool, it is free and it is at dyl.bry.net. If you want the wisdom, it is in the book. Either way, take the reading. You cannot fix what you never bothered to measure.

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