The Work Redesign Framework: Make Work Fit Into Your Life

There’s a difference between what your career requires of you and what the way you currently work requires of you.

When you’re in the middle of a demanding finance career, those two things can be difficult to separate.

The long hours, constant availability and mental load can start to feel inherent to the level you’ve reached.

Some of it may be.

But some of it may come from habits, assumptions, expectations and ways of working that have developed over the course of your career. And that can be changed.

In fact, many of those ways of working may have contributed to your success.

I’ve seen this both in my own finance career and in my work with finance professionals. The behaviours that help you build a reputation as someone who can be counted on can eventually become the very behaviours that make your success harder to sustain as your responsibilities grow.

Being highly responsive. Taking ownership. Stepping in to solve problems. Catching mistakes. Being the person people can count on. Taking on more.

Those behaviours can serve you incredibly well. But as your responsibilities grow, they can also become increasingly expensive.

Expensive in the amount of time work requires. In the mental energy you continue giving it after the workday ends. In your ability to be present for the people and things that matter outside work. And in how much capacity you have left for yourself.

There are only so many hours you can work. Only so many things you can personally oversee. Only so available you can make yourself.

At some point, continuing to succeed can’t depend on continually giving work more of your own time, energy and attention.

Success needs to come increasingly through your judgment, prioritization, decision-making, leadership, development of others and ability to influence.

That means you don’t have to step back from the career you’ve worked hard to build.

But you may need to change what your success depends on — and how work fits into the rest of your life.

That’s the work I help my clients do using The Work Redesign Framework.

It’s the methodology I use in my By Design, Not Default 1:1 Coaching Program to help finance professionals change how they work so they can continue succeeding without having to continually live the rest of their life around work.

Read on to learn more:

Why Creating More Capacity Requires More Than Managing Your Time Better

When work is taking over your life, it’s easy to assume the solution is to manage your time better.

Maybe you need to prioritize better. Delegate more. Block your calendar. Set better boundaries. Become more efficient.

Those things can absolutely help.

But they don’t necessarily address what’s underneath... why you’re working the way you are in the first place.

You might know you should delegate more. But if you believe that being accountable means personally checking every detail, you can technically delegate a task and still spend almost as much time overseeing it.

You might decide to protect your evenings. But if you believe a strong leader should always be available, you may find yourself checking your phone throughout dinner anyway.

Or you might become more efficient, only to use the time you’ve saved to take on even more work.

That’s why creating a career that fits into your life isn’t simply about finding a better system.

It’s about understanding what is creating your current experience of work and redesigning the way you operate.

And that can be difficult to do from inside your own way of working.

The beliefs and assumptions that have shaped how you work for years are often not obvious.

They tend to sound like facts:

Of course I need to review this. Obviously I need to respond tonight. There’s no one I can delegate this to. This is just what being a leader at my level requires.

Part of my role as a coach is helping clients separate what is actually required from what has become habitual, assumed or simply unquestioned.

That’s the purpose of The Work Redesign Framework.

The Work Redesign Framework

The Work Redesign Framework is the methodology I use inside By Design, Not Default to help my clients change how they work.

It gives our coaching structure without turning it into a rigid, step-by-step process.

Together, we use it to explore three important questions:

1. What are we trying to change?

2. Where can we find opportunities to redesign how you work?

3. How do we make those changes work in the reality of your day-to-day?

Importantly, this isn’t a linear, step-by-step process.

There’s no universal sequence that says, “Do this first, then this, then this, and you’ll never feel overwhelmed by work again.”

That wouldn’t reflect the realities of a demanding finance career.

Instead, we move around the framework based on what’s happening for you, what we’re learning, and where we see the biggest opportunities for change.

Here’s what that looks like.

What Are We Trying to Change?

Create Clarity → Uncover → Redesign

Before we start changing how you work, we need to understand what we’re designing toward.

What does success actually look like for you now — at work and beyond it? What do you want your career to support? And what is happening today that is getting in the way of that?

That clarity gives us somewhere to go.

From there, we start looking beneath the surface of what’s happening.

We uncover the beliefs, assumptions, habits and patterns that are shaping how you work today — often without you realizing it.

Maybe your definition of success still depends on being the person who can handle more than everyone else.

Maybe stepping in when someone on your team struggles has become automatic.

Maybe you’ve come to believe that being accountable for something means personally ensuring every detail is right.

These patterns can become so familiar that they stop looking like choices.

They become how work is.

Once we can see what’s creating the current result, we can begin to redesign it.

That could involve changing how you make decisions, prioritize, delegate, communicate, lead your team, respond to requests or manage expectations.

But the goal isn’t to make arbitrary changes in the name of working less.

It’s to understand what is no longer serving you and intentionally change how you work without compromising what actually matters.

All three pieces are important.

Create clarity about what you want. Uncover what’s creating the current result. Redesign what needs to change.

Otherwise, it’s easy to treat the symptoms of overwork while leaving the underlying patterns untouched.

Where Do We Look for Opportunities to Redesign How You Work?

You at Work & Beyond → You & Your Team → You & Your Stakeholders

How you experience work isn’t determined solely by how well you manage yourself.

Your capacity is also shaped by how you lead your team and how you operate within the environment around you.

That’s why we look across three interconnected areas.

You at Work & Beyond

We look at how you operate.

That can include your priorities, decisions, standards, habits, use of time and energy, and what success means to you now.

This is where we might discover that something you’ve been treating as a requirement of your role is actually an expectation you’ve placed on yourself.

But personal productivity is only one part of the picture.

You & Your Team

As you become more senior, your success increasingly needs to come through other people.

So we look at how work flows through your team.

Where are you holding onto work that someone else could own? Where might you be creating a bottleneck? Where could stronger delegation or developing someone else’s capability create more capacity for you while also strengthening your team?

Sometimes the answer to having more capacity isn’t getting better at managing your own workload.

It’s changing how work gets done across your team.

You & Your Stakeholders

We also look at the wider environment you’re operating in.

Your boss. Your peers. Senior leaders. Internal and external stakeholders.

Expectations and competing priorities are real, and redesigning how you work doesn’t mean pretending they don’t exist.

Instead, we look at how you communicate, influence, surface trade-offs and manage expectations within that environment.

Because your workload and capacity aren't determined solely by how well you manage yourself.

They’re also shaped by how you lead your team and how you navigate the people and expectations around you.

Changing how you work often requires looking at the whole system.

How Do We Make Changes Work in Real Life?

Hypothesize → Try → Evaluate → Iterate

Knowing how you want to work differently is one thing. Making that change work inside a demanding finance role is another.

That’s why we don’t assume there is one “right” solution and expect you to implement it perfectly.

Instead, we develop an informed hypothesis about what might work better.

You try it in your actual work environment.

Together, we evaluate what happened.

And then we use what we learned to decide what comes next.

Sometimes the result is:

That worked. Let’s keep going.

Other times, trying something reveals information we couldn't see before.

And that’s useful too.

What The Work Redesign Framework Looks Like in Practice

Imagine we identify delegation as an opportunity to create more capacity.

You currently own a monthly process that takes a significant amount of your time. Someone on your team is capable of taking greater ownership, so we hypothesize that delegating the process could reduce the amount of time you spend on it.

You try it.

But when we evaluate what happened, we discover something interesting: you’re still checking everything yourself.

You may no longer be preparing the work, but you’re reviewing every detail before it goes anywhere.

So you haven't actually created much capacity.

It would be easy to conclude: I delegated, but I'm still spending almost as much time on it. Delegation isn't creating capacity. Maybe it's just easier to do it myself.

You could take the work back, or continue delegating while checking everything, and nothing fundamentally changes.

But instead, we get curious.

Why are you still checking everything?

That conversation might uncover an assumption: If my name is attached to it, I need to personally make sure it's right.

Suddenly, we have much more useful information.

The problem wasn't necessarily delegation.

The experiment revealed something about what you believe being accountable requires of you.

We’ve gone from:

Redesign → Try → Evaluate → back to Uncover.

That’s not the framework failing. That’s the framework working.

Because if we don’t uncover and address that belief, we can change the task without changing the way you work.

And that distinction matters.

Surface-level changes can temporarily change what you’re doing. The Work Redesign Framework is intended to help us change the patterns that determine how you work.

Why Changing How You Work Can Be Hard to Do on Your Own

Most successful professionals aren't intentionally choosing ways of working that make their lives harder. They’re doing things that make sense to them.

That’s precisely why established ways of working can be difficult to see, question and change on your own.

You may not see “I need to personally review this” as an assumption. You may see it as responsible leadership.

You may not see “I need to respond tonight” as a habit. You may see it as what's expected at your level.

And you may not see how the way you lead your team or respond to stakeholders is contributing to your workload because those patterns have developed gradually over years.

This is where coaching can create a different kind of perspective.

My role isn't simply to tell you to delegate more, set better boundaries or stop checking email at night.

It’s to help you identify what’s really creating the pressure, notice patterns that are difficult to see from inside them, question assumptions that may have gone unquestioned for years, and identify changes worth testing.

Then, when you try something different, we don't simply label it a success or failure. We look at what happened, what it tells us and what we want to try next.

Over time, through this work together, you become increasingly capable of noticing when an old way of working is no longer serving you and adapting how you work as your career and life evolve.

Because there isn't one perfect way to work that you can figure out today and use forever.

Your role will change. Your team will change. Your organization will change. Your life will change.

A sustainable way of working needs to be able to change with them.

“But Can I Really Change How I Work Without Sacrificing My Success?”

This is one of the most important questions to ask. Because the ways you work today may be deeply intertwined with your success.

And the goal isn't to suddenly lower your standards, care less about work or walk into work tomorrow and stop doing things you're genuinely responsible for.

Changing how you work isn't about becoming less successful. It's about changing what your success depends on.

If your continued success increasingly depends on more of your own time, energy, oversight and availability, there will eventually be a limit.

Instead, we look for opportunities to create success increasingly through clearer priorities, better decisions, stronger leadership, greater ownership from your team and more intentional management of stakeholder expectations.

That doesn't mean every demand on you can be eliminated.

Finance can be demanding.

There will be busy periods, deadlines, unexpected problems and legitimate expectations that come with senior roles.

The Work Redesign Framework isn't about pretending those things don't exist. It's about not automatically assuming that everything work currently requires from you is required for you to continue being successful.

We find out. We make thoughtful changes. We see what happens.

And we use what we learn to determine what needs to change next.

Your Success Doesn’t Have to Depend on More of You

You don’t necessarily need a different career to have more room for the rest of your life.

But you may need a different way of working within the career you already have.

That means looking beyond how you can fit more into your day and asking a different question:

What is making your success require so much of you?

The answer won't be the same for everyone.

But it’s often difficult to see the answer clearly when you're inside it.

That’s what we explore together inside my By Design, Not Default 1:1 Coaching Program using The Work Redesign Framework.

The goal isn't to care less about your career or become less successful.

It’s to change how you create your success so work doesn't have to keep taking more of your time, energy and attention.

So that instead of continually shaping your life around the demands of work, you can create a successful career that fits into the life you want.

If reading this has you wondering how much of what work currently requires from you is truly necessary, and what you could change without compromising your success, let’s explore that together.

Book a consultation call to learn more about By Design, Not Default and what changing the way you work could look like.

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