Before Session 6 · Reading Your Journal
Read this before class — 15 to 20 minutes. Bring your Good Time Journal; we're using what's already in it. Come-ready is at the end.
The big idea: your week already told you something — you just didn't stop to read it
You've been keeping a Good Time Journal for a week now: a log of what engaged you, energized you, and pulled you into flow, and what didn't. Most people who keep a journal like this do the writing part and skip the reading part — they log the day and move on, and whatever pattern was sitting in those entries never gets found. This session is the reading part.
Burnett and Evans call this wayfinding: not choosing a destination, but paying close enough attention to your own data that you can tell which direction already has energy in it. The tool for that close attention is called AEIOU, and it works by breaking one moment into five separate angles instead of asking the vague, hard-to-answer question “was this a good day.”
A moment, taken apart
In class, one of your mentors will walk through a single moment from their own week — nothing dramatic, just a few minutes that looked ordinary until they broke it down. They'll take it apart piece by piece using the same method you're about to learn: what they were doing, where they were, who else was there, what objects were involved, who the people around them actually were. Watching someone else do this first, live, makes it easier to trust the method with your own week — and easier to believe that a moment doesn't have to be impressive to have something in it.
What AEIOU actually is
Here's how it plays out on a real case from the book. Lydia is a contract writer who had decided she hated working with people, because meetings always left her drained and writing alone always left her happy. When she ran her weeks through AEIOU, the picture got more specific: it wasn't people in general that drained her, it was planning meetings with more than five or six people in the room, where she couldn't track all the competing opinions. One-on-one work — talking through a draft, brainstorming a new idea with a single collaborator — actually energized her. The problem was never people. It was room size and structure, and she never would have found that from “I hate meetings” alone.
That's the whole use of the tool: the vague verdict (“good day,” “bad day,” “I hate this”) is almost never precise enough to act on. Running one moment through all five letters usually is.
AEIOU comes from design research, not from Burnett and Evans themselves — they borrowed it from the field of needfinding, where researchers use it to study how people actually experience a product or a space. It gives you five separate angles on one specific moment, so you're not stuck guessing at a whole day all at once.
Activities — what were you actually doing? Structured or unstructured? Were you leading, or just there?
Environments — where were you, physically? A room changes how you feel in it — a stadium and a chapel don't produce the same person.
Interactions — what were you interacting with — people, a screen, an instrument? Familiar or new? Formal or loose?
Objects — what was in your hands, on the table, part of the scene? Objects carry more of a moment's feeling than we usually notice.
Users — who else was there, and what part did they play — even from the background?
Why one moment is enough
You don't need to analyze your whole week, and you don't need to explain why every entry felt the way it did. Pick two moments from your journal — one clear high point, and one you can't quite explain — and bring them into the room as-is. The pattern shows up when you slow down on a couple of real moments, not when you try to account for all seven days.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “My good days are random. I can't explain why some moments feel alive, and others don't.”
The designer's reframe: Good moments aren't random — they leave a pattern. AEIOU is how you learn to read it.
Your journal
One entry before class: read back through this week's Good Time Journal and find the moment you're least able to explain — not the best one, the one that surprises you. Free-write on it for ten minutes. Don't solve it, don't run AEIOU on it yet — just describe it as fully as you can. Whatever you write is the raw material class this week will start with.
Come Ready
Bring your Good Time Journal, filled in for at least four days this week. Before class, circle two moments from it — one clear high point, and the one you wrote about in your journal entry above. Don't analyze them yet. Just mark them. We'll do the reading together in the room.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · AEIOU method: Dev Patnaik, Needfinding, adapted via Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Lydia's story is drawn from Designing Your Life · Worksheets and submissions on Canvas