Designing Your Life alternative: how APSP compares
Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016), by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, grew out of their Stanford course and applies design thinking to the question of what to do with your life. If you are weighing it against APSP, or looking for a Designing Your Life alternative, the short answer is that they solve different problems and can work together.
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What Designing Your Life is best at
Choosing direction. Its tools, such as tracking energy and engagement and sketching several alternative futures (odyssey plans), help you explore options by prototyping instead of overthinking. It is especially strong for career transitions.
What APSP is best at
Running the life you have chosen. APSP scores five areas, measures how they feed each other, names its own failure modes and gives every framework a rule for when to act and a check that it worked. See the APSP philosophy for the model behind it.
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Take the free life assessment →Side by side
| Designing Your Life | APSP | |
|---|---|---|
| Core method | Design thinking: curiosity, prototyping, reframing | Systems: aim, score, correct, rescore |
| Main question | What life could I build? | Is my life moving toward what it is for? |
| Format | Book, workbook, courses and workshops | Vman, 21 fillable self-scoring frameworks, community |
| Measurement | Self-rated gauges and logs | Scored audits with levels and quarterly deltas |
| Prototyping | Central | Present in the SPSDM Execution Sequence (framework 1) |
Details on Designing Your Life are from the publisher’s public description; check current editions and courses.
Using both
Use design thinking to choose the direction, then run it with APSP. Write the chosen future as your telos, take the life assessment for a baseline and follow the 90-day life plan.
Questions about Designing Your Life
Is APSP affiliated with Designing Your Life or Stanford?
No. APSP is published independently by Varch and has no affiliation with the authors, publisher or Stanford University.
Keep exploring
Take the free life assessment.
Free. 30 items. Runs in your browser; your answers are not sent anywhere.