My imaginary faux pas taught me a powerful lesson. I’d overestimated the degree to which others noticed and judged my actions. As the night continued, I looked around the room and realised that the world wasn’t focused on my every move. Everyone was far too busy attending to their own concerns, laughter and conversation.

Burnett’s design mindset offers an unusual way to answer the question. He invites you to reflect on: Your Current Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you continued down your current path. Your Alternative Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you took a comple

Make a start. You won’t need to get perfect for a long time yet.

Remember that this book isn’t a to-do list. It’s a philosophy – a way of creating your own personalised productivity toolkit. One that allows you to reap all of the amazing rewards of feeling good, every day, and in the long term. And one that involves approaching your daily projects and tasks in the spirit of experimentation.

So far, we’ve examined how to work out our overall purpose – by asking the ‘why’ – and identifying specific end-goals and tasks – by asking the ‘what’. But there’s one more question we haven’t answered. If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it.

I often think of my life as containing a series of side quests. Every day as I sit down to work, I look at my calendar and to-do list, and I ask myself: ‘What’s today’s side quest going to be?’ This question helps me shift my mindset from the obvious tasks that lie ahead to the potential alternative avenues they might take me down. It might prompt

Once you’ve identified your ‘why’, you’ll need to convert it into something slightly more concrete. After all, a nebulous sense of purpose isn’t enough to get a project off the ground; you also need a detailed action plan, lest you find yourself with no idea where to start.

These studies, and countless others, prove something that most of us instinctively know to be true: when we’re stressed, we’re less likely to be playful. And our creativity, productivity and wellbeing tend to suffer too.

At the end of the study, all groups reported feeling distressed about the experience. But some fared better than others. And the group that fared best of all were those who had put their fears into words.