Most of us treat life design as something you get to after the urgent things are handled. Ameera Virani of The Designed Life puts it in a different category altogether.
Not A Priority — A Responsibility
“Designing your life is not just your first priority, it’s your responsibility.”
— Ameera Virani, The Designed Life
She grounds it in something specific rather than motivational. Her reasoning is that “I have watched people in my own life, myself included, think that we have this unlimited runway of time. And we leave things to chance. We put out a hope, or a wish or a prayer, and we hope that it’ll just land, that things will just work out.”
The word responsibility is doing real work there. A priority can be deferred when something louder arrives. A responsibility cannot.
The Deathbed Line That Reframes Everything
Virani describes a pendulum swing in how work is talked about — from an era when long hours signalled commitment, to now:
“no one ever looked back on their deathbed and said, I wish I had spent more time at work. You know, they look back, they look back and say, I wish I had spent more time with my kids when they were young. I wish I hadn’t missed those soccer games or dance recitals.”
— Ameera Virani
And she extends it past the obvious reading. Speaking about people she has known who were seriously ill, she says the regret was not only about time spent: “The regret is that they didn’t start sooner. The regret is that they didn’t put the effort in, that they didn’t dream bigger, and at least take the shot.”
That is a harder line than the usual work-life-balance version. It is not only about doing less. It is about not postponing the thing you actually want.
Auditing A Week You Did Not Choose
This part is ours rather than hers. Print last week — the real one, not the intended one. Colour three ways: hours you actively chose, hours you accepted because someone asked, and hours you cannot account for.
Most people are startled by how small the first block is, and how large the third one is. You are not looking for a villain. You are looking for the two or three recurring commitments that were never actually decided on, just inherited.
Small Changes That Hold
Virani’s own framing is helpfully modest about this: “it’s not that you can plan everything to a T, but you need to know what it is you truly desire to experience.”
So the changes that survive contact with a real week tend to be small and structural rather than large and aspirational — one evening protected, one recurring meeting ended, one morning hour moved before anyone else is awake. The measure of whether it held is not how it felt in week one. It is whether it is still there in week six.
When To Ask For Help
Also ours. If the audit keeps producing the same answer and nothing moves, the obstacle is usually not scheduling — it is that the change costs something in a relationship, and no calendar app can negotiate that for you.
Virani’s work centres on helping women in particular reclaim “their confidence, their personal power, to really own their dreams,” noting that many “came up in a workplace or a system where maybe they didn’t feel like their voice was heard.” If that lands, it is worth naming out loud rather than scheduling around.
More on the same territory in Jo of The Balance Institute on work, motherhood and burnout.
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