Architecting Your Life

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects

March 28, 2024

When it comes to the discipline of life and improving our lives, we need a Life Architecture methodology to achieve a desired life.  Life Architecture must be governed by a set of guidelines, practices, principles, concepts, conventions, assumptions, and rules – similar to an Enterprise Architecture methodology used by organizations – as we architect our lives.  These constructs have evolved over many years as organization’s have strived for prestige and dominance.  And we have borrowed and transformed them to provide a framework for Life Architecture.  In simple English, a Life Architecture methodology is an approach to architect and enhance our lives.

Life Architecture has been formalized as a structured, measured approach geared to improve our lives and afford us the best possible life in a chosen environment, regardless whether it’s at home or at work.  A good Life Architecture starts with a conscientious assessment of our life today and transforms it into a life that we have deliberately mapped out for ourselves.  In business, we refer to Enterprise Architecture as an approach to improve an organization’s current situation, or specifically the business capabilities, mapped out by its management team and business visionaries.  We use the word “enterprise” because we consider all of an organization’s capabilities (processes, work activities, people, systems, and data) across all functional areas (Sales, Production, Accounting, etc.) and optimize these capabilities and their relationships.  In terms of our personal lives, Life Architecture guides us in improving various life capabilities as we define all the things that we do and add value to our lives.  Life Architecture also allows us to understand the benefits and value we add to our lives.

The following five constructs constituting a life architecture are the building blocks to a better future.

We start with our vision, complete a Self-Assessment, put a value on our life, make a plan to reach our desired life and develop a schedule.  So, how does life architecture work?  We develop a current and future life blueprint to formulate our vision.  We identify the life rules that have held us back and come up with a new set of rules for the future.  We also develop a personal behavioral assessment matrix to capture our innermost needs and desires.  A life value chain defines our life value proposition. A life roadmap takes us from where we are today to where we want to go and consists of many life results chains.  A life web schedules all the actions in our life roadmap to ensure we get to our desired life.  The deliverables pertaining to each construct are described below.How do the five constructs fit together?  To answer that, let’s consider all the terms next to the constructs in the preceding table.  A Current Life Blueprint maps out our current situation, which is later transformed into a Future Life Blueprint representing the life we desire.  However, we’re not always sure what that desired life is or what it looks like.  This is why we identify the Life Rules that have held us back and come up with a new set of life rules for the future.  We also develop a Personal Behavioral Assessment Matrix to capture our innermost needs and desires.  This might be a good time to understand the value of our lives and perform a litmus test to see where our value proposition sits on a Life Value Chain.  If we have a Current Life Blueprint representing our current life and a Future Life Blueprint representing our future life, we need to develop a Life Roadmap to take us from where we are today to where we want to go in the future.  A Life Roadmap can be a large undertaking and we may need to break it down into several Life Results Chains, which represent different aspects of our lives.  And to make sure we get to our desired life, we need to schedule all the actions in our Life Roadmap on a Life Web to ensure we get there in a reasonable timeframe.

Life Architecture as a methodology has been adapted from Enterprise Architecture, which is used by organizations to optimize their business processes and align information technology to best automate their business processes.  People also have processes, or what Life Architecture refers to as “life processes.”  Similar to organizations that use Enterprise Architecture to develop and deploy optimized business processes,  Life Architecture is a methodology used to guide individuals in improving their life processes while aligning them to personal ambitions and desires.  Life Architecture was introduced as a way to define a future Life Blueprint aligned with an individual’s goals, objectives, and personal desires.  Life Architecture provides a structured approach to rationalize the current state of an individual’s life processes and translates a current state process mapping to a desired future state Life Blueprint.  The goal of Life Architecture is to articulate a future life value proposition as a basis for the development of future life processes.  A Life Architectural methodology applies a structured and rigid approach and includes architectural principles, methods, practices, governance, and deliverables.  If you want to learn more about Life Architecture, go to www.ArchitectingYourLife.com.