How I designed a working life around my values (and why it's still not finished)

Most articles about designing your ideal working life end with a tidy conclusion. The person figures it out, leaves the job, builds something they love, and wraps it up with a lesson. This is not that article.

I left my senior SEO role at a marketing agency after burning out every few months for about a year. I had a rough sense of what I wanted, more autonomy, better health, work that was actually mine. But rough is the right word. When I handed in my notice, I had a direction, not a map.

The values I thought I had versus the ones I actually had

Before I left, I would have said my values were about doing meaningful work and having more flexibility. Both true, but vague enough to be almost useless as a guide. Plenty of jobs offer flexibility. Plenty of work feels meaningful in the interview and hollow six months in.

What I eventually got clearer on, through a combination of the Ikigai framework, a lot of reading about human psychology and how people actually make decisions, and a fair amount of trial and error, was that I had three things I wasn't willing to compromise on anymore.

Autonomy. Not just flexible hours, but genuine ownership of how I work, what I work on, and who I work with. The open plan office, the constant context switching, the work that arrived without warning and demanded immediate attention, all of it was the opposite of this.

Health. Not as an aspiration but as a non-negotiable. The burnout cycle I had been in wasn't just unpleasant. It was unsustainable. I had been treating my health as something to recover between work cycles rather than something to protect consistently. That had to change.

Creativity. Building things that are mine. Products, ideas, systems. The satisfaction of making something from nothing and being able to point to it and say I did that. Agency work gave me almost none of this. Someone else's brief, someone else's brand, someone else's approval.

These three things, autonomy, health, and creativity, turned out to be the actual filter. Every decision I've made since leaving has run through them, consciously or not.

What Ikigai actually did for me

Ikigai is a Japanese concept built around the overlap of four questions. What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? What can you be paid for? The place where all four meet is, roughly, your reason for being.

I had seen it before and dismissed it as a bit abstract. What changed when I actually sat down and worked through it honestly was that it forced me to separate what I was good at from what I enjoyed, which turn out to be different things more often than you'd expect. I was good at SEO strategy. I did not particularly enjoy it. I enjoyed understanding how people think, how environments shape behaviour, how small systems create big changes. That was what I wanted to build towards.

It didn't give me a business plan. It gave me a direction that felt genuinely mine rather than something I had drifted into.

The working life I've built so far

Studio Hardeep came out of this process. Not as a grand plan but as the most honest expression I could find of the overlap between what I know, what I care about, and what I think is actually useful to people.

My background in architecture taught me to observe how people inhabit physical space. Years of reading about psychology and cognition gave me a framework for understanding focus, stress, and what actually helps people recover. The burnout gave me skin in the game. The result is a small brand built around physical tools and practical knowledge for people who want to work differently.

The daily rhythm I've built around it looks nothing like a corporate working day. Morning walks before I open a laptop. A timer that protects focused work in real blocks rather than the constant fragmented attention of an open office. Small rituals that mark the beginning and end of the working day. A low expense base that gives me room to build slowly rather than desperately.

Autonomy. Health. Creativity. The three values are present in the structure of the day, not just the work itself.

Why it's still evolving

I want to be honest about this part because most accounts of career redesign skip it.

Eighteen months on, the working life I wanted is more real than it has ever been. It is also still being built. Some income streams are working. Others are being tested. The community layer of the business doesn't exist yet in the way I want it to. There are still days where the lack of structure that comes with working for yourself is harder than the structure of a job I didn't want.

Designing a working life around your values is not a project you complete. It is a practice you maintain. The values don't change much once you've found them. The work of living by them is ongoing.

That is not a caveat. It is the point. The goal was never to arrive somewhere finished. It was to stop running a working life that was costing me my health and start building one that was actually mine.

That part is done. The rest is just what comes next.

Hardeep is the founder of Studio Hardeep, a brand built around physical tools and practical knowledge for people redesigning their working lives. If this resonated, the About Hardeep page has more of the story.