The space around you affects your psychological state. It can either help or hinder your goals. You can’t seize the day when you spend 20 minutes hunting around for clothes, or rustling around in your cabinets for the correct cooking utensils. These Design issues can have a domino effect, as well; if your kitchen is not organized, for example, you may be more inclined to eat out. This could affect your finances, and also lead to a degradation of your health, and make your car messy if you’re the kind of person who eats fast food while in the car. This will build up and lock you in a never-ending cycle of being stressed about these things, and not having enough energy to do anything about them.
Are there remnants on the wall in the form of posters from your regrettable Scene Phase? Do you have a place to put your keys and pocket items whenever you come home so you don’t keep misplacing them?
This can also be virtual space; do you have a cluttered bookmarks bar in your web browser? Are there programs that could be accessed quicker through a shortcut? Do you need to organize that cluttered desktop, or set restrictions on yourself so you don’t end up scrolling through facebook mindlessly?
What about your car? Your mode of transportation is a crucial resource towards accomplishing your goals. Could you put a small box in the back seat for all your trash, instead of letting it accumulate on the floor? Or maybe you could invest in a first aid kit for emergencies, and stow it in your glove box. Perhaps you could make a stash of granola bars to curb your tendency to buy fast food while you are out.
What about your work space? Do you need to move your gaming consoles into a different room from where you usually work?
Homework
Spend thirty minutes on the Design exercise, adding any bugs to the list from session 1. After you're done with Design, review your Slice of Life bugs and see if any of them are actually Design bugs. For example, “I wake up feeling tired” might actually be caused by “My bed is uncomfortable”, or “I have distracting things around my bed”.