Renovate Your House, Renovate Your Life

Do you spend less than 20% of your time at work doing work that matters to you? Do you spend more time sitting on a $30 stool in your kitchen than in one of your $300 dining room chairs? Architect Sarah Susanka, author of the bestselling book The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live

,” sees parallels between these two problems. She’s developed a blueprint for renovating your life that can also be used to renovate your career.  Her deceptively simple message remains as powerful as ever: when it comes to our homes, quality should always come before quantity. With comforting guidance and clear language, America’s favourite home architect shows how to create a house that emphasizes comfort, beauty, and a high level of detail.

In that type of life, the work you do and the people you spend time with are those that matter most to you. “The ‘Not So Big’ concept is about focusing your time and energy on what you really love—in your life and in your work,” says Susanka. “You are reapportioning how you spend your time—transitioning time spent on areas you don’t care about into time spent on what you do care about.”

If you’re feeling stuck in your job or career, here are five concepts from the book that you can apply to your own career renovation. (For the full blueprint, check out the book and website.

Tips to Renovate Your Career & Life

1. Start by Identifying What Isn’t Working

It’s easy to point to the things we’d like to have time for and to “rattle off a list of ways to get the things we have to do done more efficiently,” says Susanka, “but we often don’t realize that the real problem is not a lack of time, but how we engage time in general. To successfully remodel your life, you need to identify and sort through the clutter to make room for change.”

Have you been going to a networking breakfast for three years and not getting anything out of it? It’s okay to say no. “The art of finding time has primarily to do with seeing how we obscure our desires by filling the day with not very important stuff that we think is impossible to avoid.”

2. Do One Thing at a Time

Be present in what you are doing. “Every time you find yourself multi-tasking, take a deep breath, decide which one requires your attention the most, and do only that one thing,” says Susanka. “If you believe you don’t have time to single task, remember that by multi-tasking you are, in fact, not doing either thing effectively because you are not completely engaged.”

3. Stay Focused on Now

When you find yourself dwelling on the past or thinking about the future, “you are not present in what’s happening now,” says Susanka. “A big part of living a Not So Big life is staying fully present with what’s happening right now. I’m aware of all of the things that could move me in a direction, but I stay tuned into the immediate. You may think that when you’re always focused on where you are, you’re not going to get somewhere. But when you know what matters to you and you are always focused on what needs to happen now, you are moving forward.”

Here’s an easy way to get started: Take three times as long to drink your morning coffee. What do you see and notice when you’re not on autopilot?

4. Change a Behavior Pattern

“All of us have patterns of behavior that we are strongly attached to, such as never wearing a watch or running ten minutes late for everything,” says Susanka. “Make a conscious decision to change one of your most defining behavior patterns for a month, and see what happens. Over the course of our lives we come to believe that our patterns are who we are, when in fact they are just habits that we’ve identified with and become attached to.”

Change just one or two of these habits, and you’ll likely find that everything else becomes more flexible as well.

5. Don’t Mistake a “Not So Big Life” for a Small or Unimportant Life

Living a “Not So Big life” doesn’t necessarily mean living a small life; it is about living a life that is focused and meaningful to you. I asked Susanka to give me some public examples of individuals who have led a not so big life. One of the first that came to mind? “Steve Jobs. He followed his heart from day one. He focused his efforts on his products, company and family.” As Jobs once said, “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”

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