You're Not Lazy — Your Life Was Designed Wrong (Here’s How To Take It Back) | David Dewane

Most of us operate under the assumption that our inability to focus is a personal moral failing. We believe that if we were simply more disciplined, we could resist the siren song of the smartphone or the relentless hum of the inbox. But what if the problem isn’t your willpower, but rather the blueprint of your daily life? We often try to perform deep, cognitive work in environments designed for shallow distraction, expecting our brains to override the very spaces we inhabit.

In a recent conversation with architect David Dewane—the mind behind the "Eudaimonia Machine" concept featured in Deep Work—we explored how to stop being a victim of your environment and start acting as its architect. Dewane has spent years translating high-level philosophical concepts into physical realities, from designing the ideal workspace to engineering a lifestyle that oscillates between high-intensity collaboration and profound solitude. This isn't just about office furniture; it is about systematically restructuring your existence to move from a state of languishing to a state of flourishing.

Key Takeaways

• Distinguish functionality from performance: A space can function as an office while failing to perform as a catalyst for deep work.
• Implement the "Collins Score": A simple daily metric that tracks creative hours against a subjective rating of flourishing (-2 to +2) to identify what actually makes a day valuable.
• Create "alternating currents" in your lifestyle: Design your life to toggle between high-energy social environments and low-stimulation seclusion to maximize the benefits of both.
• Beware the metric black hole: In knowledge work, the lack of objective productivity metrics often leads to performative busyness; you must create your own scorecard to survive.
• Architect your future: Radical life changes don't always require massive wealth; they require creative resource allocation and a willingness to play the long game.

From Function to Performance: The Architecture of Focus

In the world of architecture, there is a profound difference between a building that functions and a building that performs. A trailer can function as a school—it keeps the rain off the students and provides a place to sit. However, it does not perform like the campus of Georgetown or Oxford, where the physical environment itself connects students to history, signals the gravity of their work, and induces a state of intellectual seriousness.

Most modern knowledge workers are trying to produce elite-level work in "trailer" environments. We have accepted the open office plan—a design that essentially puts your brain in a blender—as the default. This environment fosters a state of "languishing." You aren't necessarily depressed or failing, but you are hovering at a baseline of mediocrity, constantly reacting to stimuli rather than directing your attention.

The space is cataclysmically relevant. If you want to make something remarkable with other people, you have to do it in an environment that is set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity.

The goal of "life architecture" is to move from functional spaces to performative ones. This applies to the physical office, but also to the digital landscape. Just as an open office invites interruption, a workflow centered on Slack and constant email monitoring is a digital design flaw. It functions as communication, but it performs as an engine of anxiety. To flourish, we must be ruthless about designing barriers that protect our cognitive resources.

The Collins Score: Measuring Human Flourishing

One of the most effective tools for escaping the "metric black hole" of knowledge work is a system Dewane adapted from business consultant Jim Collins. In an industry where "productivity" is often vaguely defined as "answering emails quickly," we need a personal scorecard to track what actually matters.

How the Score Works

The system requires tracking three specific data points at the end of every day:

1. Creative Hours: The number of hours spent on deep, focused work (or "flow" states).
2. Daily Rating: A subjective score on a scale from -2 to +2.
3. The Why: A brief, one-sentence qualitative note explaining the rating.

The rating scale is the genius of the system. A zero represents languishing—the days where you aren't sad or stressed, but you also aren't alive. You answered emails, you sat in meetings, and the day simply evaporated. A +2 represents a day of exquisite flourishing, often correlated with high creative hours or meaningful connection. A -2 is a day actively detracted from your life.

If you’re not paying attention, the default hovers around zero... Zero is ‘I don’t even really know what happened today.’

Using Data to Engineer Happiness

When you track this over time, patterns emerge that are invisible in the moment. You might realize that every time you interact with a specific client, your score drops to a -1. Or, you might find that days where you start with 90 minutes of writing never drop below a +1. This moves lifestyle design from a vague "vibe" to an evidence-based practice. You stop hoping for a good day and start engineering the conditions that historically produce them.

The "Farm" Strategy: Alternating Currents

A common misconception about the "deep life" is that it requires abandoning society to live in a cabin permanently. A more robust approach is to design "alternating currents"—a rhythm that oscillates between the manic energy of the city and the slow, deep focus of the country.

Dewane implemented this by acquiring a modest farm property two hours outside of Chicago. During the week, he engages in the high-speed, collaborative world of architecture in the city. On weekends, he retreats to the farm, where he planted a cider apple orchard and built a writer's cottage by hand. This dichotomy allows him to fully inhabit two necessary human modes: the social animal and the solitary thinker.

Creativity Over Capital

Crucially, this lifestyle wasn't bought with extreme wealth; it was bought with extreme creativity. By utilizing Airbnb to rent out their city home when they were at the farm, and vice versa, Dewane and his wife turned a financial impossibility into a sustainable ecosystem. This is a vital lesson in lifestyle planning: we often assume we need more money to change our lives, when what we usually need is more ingenuity in how we allocate the assets we already have.

Intentionality in a Distracted World

Living deeply in a shallow world requires defensive tools. If you do not fill your time with intention, the world will fill it with noise. Two specific strategies can help maintain this intentionality:

The 100-Year Plan

Standard productivity looks at the day or the week. Deep productivity looks at the lifetime. By maintaining a "Life Time Block Planner"—a physical document mapping out decades—you can place current frustrations in perspective. Projects that seem urgent today are revealed as noise, while long-term goals (like planting an orchard that takes years to fruit) are given the priority they deserve.

Resisting the "Sloppy Sympathy" of Busyness

In our careers, we often confuse intensity with consistency. We launch radical projects or volunteer for every committee because we crave the feeling of being useful. This is the professional equivalent of what the Dalai Lama calls "sloppy sympathy"—throwing energy at a problem without the sustained commitment to actually solve it.

True depth requires the discipline to do less, but to do it with absolute commitment. It means enduring the social friction of not being on Slack every minute. It means accepting that you might be perceived as "unavailable" in the short term, so that you can produce work that is undeniable in the long term.

Conclusion: Architects, Not Victims

We are currently living through a transition period in knowledge work. The old models—open offices, hyper-connectivity, standard 9-to-5s—are failing to produce either happiness or high-quality output. As we move into an era where AI handles the drudgery, human creativity and deep thinking will become the true coin of the realm.

You have a choice. You can remain a victim of the default settings, letting your inbox dictate your mood and your calendar dictate your life. Or, you can adopt the mindset of the architect. You can look at the raw materials of your time, your space, and your attention, and start building something that doesn't just function, but performs.

We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.

Start small. Track your Collins Score for a month. Find one recurring source of "negative days" and eliminate it. Carve out one physical space that signals "depth" to your brain. You don't need a farm or a 100-year plan to start; you just need to decide that your life is a project worth designing.