Designing a life you actually want to live in

Most of us are living a life that accumulated rather than a life we designed. The difference between the two is not a matter of luck or circumstance. It is a matter of attention.

The accumulated life happens by default. A series of reasonable decisions, each one individually sensible, that together add up to something that fits about as well as a suit bought for someone else’s measurements. The job that made sense at the time. The city you stayed in because leaving felt complicated. The rhythm of days that assembled itself around obligations and never quite got examined.

The designed life is different. Not because it is perfect or complete or free of difficulty. But because it is conscious. Because someone, YOU, looked at the texture of the days and asked: is this what I want? And then made choices in service of the honest answer rather than the convenient one.

Moving to Scotland was that for me. Not just a change of location but an act of design. Looking honestly at what I wanted the shape of my daily life to be and building toward that rather than away from what no longer fit. The process of noticing the difference between the accumulated life and the designed one is what this article is about.

The life that runs you

Here’s how the accumulated life works. You make a decision: take the job, stay in the city, keep the commitments. And each decision brings with it a set of defaults. A rhythm. A shape to your days. And because you’re busy living the life, you don’t often stop to examine whether the defaults are serving you or whether you’re serving them.

I brought a lot of defaults with me into my post-corporate life. The instinct to be perpetually available. The need to fill every gap with productivity. The measuring of a good day by how much got done rather than by how the work felt, or what got made. I’d changed the content of my life without redesigning the container. The container was still running me.

There’s a useful phrase for this: the invisible architecture. The habits and patterns and defaults that organise your life below the level of conscious choice. The things you do not because you’ve decided to but because you’ve always done them that way. Most of us never examine it. We just live inside it. The work of designing a life rather than accumulating one begins with noticing it. Seeing the defaults. Asking which of them you’d choose, if you were choosing from scratch.

What do you want your days to feel like?

This might sound like a luxury question. I want to argue it’s one of the most practical ones you can spend time with.

Not what do you want to achieve. Not what do you want to have built in five years. What do you want your actual days to feel like: the texture of them, the rhythm, the quality of attention you bring to them?

When I arrived in Scotland and started building the life I wanted rather than the one that accumulated, some of the answers surprised me. I wanted mornings that weren’t immediately swallowed by email. I wanted to be outside before 9am at least some days, camera in hand, before the day had made its demands. I wanted meals that were actual meals, eaten without a screen. I wanted the working hours to feel purposeful rather than frantic.

I can tell you exactly what it feels like, because I’ve been there. I was in Peru, travelling along the Amazon River by longboat to a birding conference in Iquitos. Most of the trip had been planned in advance: a travel agent, an itinerary, days accounted for. But this stretch on the water was different. Camera in hand, no agenda beyond arriving at the destination, just the river and whatever appeared along the banks. And so much appeared. Birds and animals hiding in plain sight, visible only if you were moving slowly enough and quietly enough to notice them. The river had its own pace and the boat matched it, and there was nothing to do but be there: watching, photographing, breathing. Every breath felt easy. I remember noticing that specifically. The ease of it. Life moving at the speed it was designed to move. Days like that are a reminder to me that we are built for slower living than most of us are doing. Not lazy living: the birding was purposeful; the photography was focused. But unhurried. Intentional. Present. That quality of attention: where you’re fully in the moment rather than managing the moment: is what I’ve been designing toward ever since. My life in Scotland is the closest I’ve come to it in the everyday. Not every day has that quality. But enough of them do that I know I’m building in the right direction.

“Most of us are living the life that accumulated. The designed life starts with a different question: what do I want my days to feel like?”

Mapping your energy honestly

The most useful piece of self-knowledge I have isn’t about my values or my strengths. It’s about my energy.

I know when I’m sharp. I know when I’m capable of the work that requires full presence: the photography, the writing, the thinking that goes somewhere. I also know when I’m not, and have learned, finally, to stop scheduling demanding creative work into those hours.

For me it’s mornings. Early, before the day has accumulated its weight. I do my best thinking, my best photographing, my best writing in those early hours when everything is still quiet and mine. By mid-afternoon something dims. I can manage things. I can’t make things. Not at the level I want to make them.

What’s your map? Not the aspirational one, not the person you’d be in ideal conditions. The actual map. When do you do your best work? When do you need routine, lower-stakes tasks? When do you need to stop and rest rather than pushing through? Designing from your actual energy rather than your ideal energy is the difference between a creative practice that sustains you and one that exhausts you.

The people question

This is the one that took me longest to learn and that I wish I’d understood earlier.

The people you build around matter. Not just the people in your life in general. But specifically the people you share your creative work with, the people in your orbit when you’re in the most vulnerable stages of building something.

Some people make the work feel bigger when they encounter it. They ask good questions. They see what you’re doing and reflect it back in a way that helps you understand it better yourself. They energise rather than drain. They make you want to make more. Others: often well-meaning, often people who love you: do the opposite. They ask the practical questions before the idea is robust enough to survive them. They make the dream sound smaller and more precarious than it felt before you told them.

Neither kind of person is wrong to exist in your life. But you get to choose what you share with each of them and when. The early, fragile stages of a dream don’t need everyone’s response.

I am fortunate enough to have a friend like Lisa in my life. We have been in each other’s lives for years, and she is one of the people I build alongside. She is not just a friend: she is someone who is actively designing her own life, making deliberate choices about what she wants her days to look like and who she wants to become. If you are reading Still Becoming for the first time, Lisa is the kind of person this publication is written for and about. The woman who is not waiting for the life to happen. The woman who is building it. Having someone like that alongside you changes what feels possible. Their belief in the work makes the work more real.

Find your people like that. The ones who say “of course you should do that” when you say the scary thing. The ones who are building something themselves and understand what that takes. Build toward them. Share the tender parts with them first.

Designing toward rest

I saved this one for last because I think it’s the most resisted.

Rest is not the reward for finishing. You will not finish. There is always more. If you’re treating rest as something you earn by completing the list, you will never rest, because the list is never done.

Rest is part of the design. It’s the thing that makes the creative work possible over years rather than months. The unhurried morning, the walk that has no agenda, the evening that doesn’t involve a screen: these aren’t indulgences. They’re infrastructure. They’re what the well fills from.

One of the gifts Scotland gave me was permission to rest in a way I hadn’t before. Something about the pace of it. The fact that the landscape demands your attention and rewards slowness. The reminder, regular and involuntary, that you are a small thing in a very large and very beautiful world, and some days the right creative act is simply to notice it.

Whatever your version of that is: whatever genuinely restores you rather than just pausing the exhaustion: design toward it. Treat it as seriously as you treat the work itself. Because without it, the work suffers, and so do you.

The designed life isn’t a destination

I want to be clear about something, because I think the phrase “designing your life” can sound like arriving somewhere. Like a finished state where everything is intentional and nothing accumulated and all the defaults are the right defaults.

That’s not what it is. It’s a practice. An ongoing noticing. The regular asking of the question: is this the life I’m choosing, or is this just the life that happened? Some defaults are fine. You don’t need to examine everything. But the big ones, the ones that shape the texture of your days and the quality of your creative work and the degree to which you feel like yourself when you’re in the middle of it: those are worth looking at. Again, and again. As many times as it takes.

The life that fits isn’t found. It’s made. Continuously, imperfectly, with a lot of revision along the way. That’s not a problem with the process. That’s the process.

This week: ask the question. Is this the life I’m choosing, or the life that accumulated? Pick one default: one habit or pattern or way of spending time. And examine it. Is it yours? Would you choose it? If not, what would you choose instead? That’s where the designing begins.

Go be gloriously you.

Jules