Workview & Lifeview

Write a short compass for work and one for life, check it against how you actually spent last week, and leave with one concrete change you will try for three months.

Practice, not research: the Workview and Lifeview exercise comes from a Stanford design course and has no controlled test (Burnett & Evans, 2016). Research on meaningful work finds strong links with engagement and job satisfaction, but those are correlations and do not test this exercise (Allan, Batz-Barbarich, Sterling & Tay, 2019). The alignment score and the time boxes are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You are weighing a job offer, a career change or starting your own business and want a filter for the options.
• Work feels busy but hollow, or it keeps eating time you meant for something else.
• You are about to set yearly goals and want them to rest on what you actually value.

Skip it when:

• You need to name your values first: start with 1.1 Values & Motivators Worksheet.
• You already know your compass and want to track balance week by week: use 1.19 Work-Love-Play-Health Dashboard.

The exercise borrows a habit from design: write down your compass before you generate options. One short statement says what you believe work is for, another what you believe a life is for, and then you check whether the two fit (Burnett & Evans, 2016). It is practitioner craft from a Stanford course, with no controlled evidence, and it promises orientation rather than results.

The reasoning is still useful. A lot of career unhappiness is mismatch, not failure: a gap between what you do and what you think the doing is for. You cannot see that gap until the compass is on paper. The two views also have to be read together, because they collide in your calendar long before they collide in your head.

So Step 1 asks for red flags as well as ideals, since red flags separate options more sharply. Step 2 checks your lifeview against a real week. Step 3 makes every conflict carry options, and Step 4 ends with one shift, because a compass only earns its place when it steers a decision.

Write what work is for, in your own words, then rank its purposes for you and name the signs of bad work. Write what you believe, not what sounds good in an interview.

Strong answer: "Work is how I solve problems that matter to the people we serve and how I support my family. Red flag: a role where I am asked to cut corners on quality to hit a number." Not "work should be fun and meaningful."

What work is for, for me (two or three sentences):

A great workweek for me looks like (what I do, with whom, how it ends):

Illustrative example: the person and all hours are made up.

An operations coordinator at a regional hospital in Finland, with two children, feels drained despite liking the job.

Step 1: Work is for "making care less bureaucratic and keeping the family secure." Top purposes: impact, security, autonomy. Red flags: being micromanaged, meetings that lead nowhere, quality traded for a number.

Step 2: Love: ideal 20, last week 12. Play: ideal 6, last week 1. Health: ideal 10, last week 4. Learning and Community are both low but close to ideal. In five years: a senior operations role with no more than a normal working week.

Step 3: Alignment 5 of 10. Conflict 1: the job rewards late evenings; dinner at home matters most. Options: two fixed early days, delegate the weekly report, ask to drop one project. Conflict 2: play and exercise are treated as optional. Options: exercise before work, protect Sunday afternoon. Reinforcement: a good day at work means a better evening at home.

Step 4: Leave at 17:00 on Tuesday and Thursday and exercise three mornings a week. The team hears it on Monday. Review in twelve weeks.