Where do you want to start?
Crafts develop from first taste to full mastery. The more you practise, the more you can achieve and the greater fulfilment you will discover (daily).
Encounter
Watch a reel, read a post, subscribe to the newsletter. No commitment, no expectations – just a first brush with the idea that your day might be the thing to shape.
Foundation
Two simple sessions. Practical tools. Just enough to shift a few habits and see what Day Crafting can actually do. Or get hold of the Introductory Workbook and make a start.
Apprenticeship
Go deeper. Use the full set of workbooks. Learn to design different kinds of days. Reflect, tweak, shape. Whether self-led or supported, this is where practice becomes identity.
Practitioner
Maybe you're sharing the language, running a taster, inviting someone in. Or you’re quietly modelling crafted days. Either way, you’ve moved from trying the work to living it.
Day Crafting is for people who want to make today a masterpiece ... who know that a good life is not a destination but a daily practice.
What is Day Crafting
What if you changed your emphasis from the goal at the end of the journey to the journey itself.
What if you focussed on what you were brilliant at doing and learned how to make that the centrepiece of each day.
What if you used simple tools to improve the day you’re living.
What if the secret to a good life was to accumulate good days.
What if there were methods to craft your days around your strengths, energy and scheduling preferences, that resulted in satisfying productivity, greater resilience, inner balance and wellbeing.
That's the aim of Day Crafting
As a Day Crafter you step into your metaphorical workshop space and select the practice rhythms and tools that suit your skills and materials. It’s your choice to work on the small details to balance your every-days, or work to craft perfect one-off days full of extraordinary moments.
Within the practice of Day Crafting, you work primarily on today. In contrast to many coaching and development programmes, the emphasis of Day Crafting shifts from long term hopes and plans to behaviours and methods in the here-and-now. Ideas about long term change are not neglected but the Day Crafting approach suggests that the good life is made up of good todays instead of something we hope to arrive at in the future.
The good life in two steps:
Step one, balance and flourish today.
Step two, repeat step one tomorrow.
But there's a problem
Despite the simplicity of the idea, sorting today out comes as a challenge for most people. It's relatively easy and inspiring to imagine a more desirable future but sorting today, sorting now, by contrast involves more conflicted aspects of our psychology, habits and behaviours.
Day Crafting addresses these challenges head-on and with guidance you can make rapid progress.
I’ve been developing Day Crafting ever since I started coaching 15+ years ago when I first noticed the future-vs-now problem described above. So I’ve pioneered a different framework for personal development, away from coaching models based on sports or business metaphors, towards a more rhythmic, creative and interconnected model focussing on behaviour design, intention and balance.
Intention
Balance
Flourish
Follow Day Crafting for regular reels and explainers:
What has inspired the Day Crafting model?
The daily rhythms and processes of craftwork offer a radically different method. They appeal instinctively in heart and soul to people for whom nothing else has quite resonated.
Craftwork is not only about shaping natural materials by hand and tool. The language of craftwork has an ancient relationship with matters of the self, where we, our relationships and lives, are the material – and the tools are daily behaviours, disciplines and practices.
Some ancient monastic environments were called ‘workshops' and their ’tools’ were the core methods of their rule-of-life.
I’ve been influenced by the ways of craftspeople all my life – with a professional potter and an instrument maker as parents and now an artisan baker as my wife. I was myself originally trained and apprenticed as a graphic designer.
Day Crafting is a new approach to personal exploration and development bringing together my experience as a positive psychology coach and as a behavioural designer.
His approach changed my life dramatically. Just reading it has shifted something for me already! Bruce Stanley you are bloody brilliant.
Charlie Ewer, Apprenticeship
Day Crafting is a phenomenal way to take control of your calendar, reclaim your energy, assess why you do things, and make small shifts for a healthy balanced life. The Day Crafting Course helped me realign my day, realise my most productive times, optimise and safeguard my time from derailments, and go deeper into the why behind my bad habits. I think this is a course everyone needs!
Rev. Monica Childers, Apprenticeship
Day Crafting has changed my life improving my productivity and the balance of activities (work and pleasure) in my life. Using the analogy of craft work and apprenticeship you can learn a whole series of tools and techniques to intentionally craft good days one day at a time. You won't be disappointed.
Nick B, Workbook
I love to learn, I've done lots of courses, and this is the course I've spoken to more people about than anything in years. Day Crafting has given me tools to carve out time for peace and creativity which has meant I haven't felt overwhelmed. It's like a gift of time I wouldn't normally make time for.
Emma Major, Apprenticeship
Life changing! A really easy to use and interesting way to change how to live my life. The exercises are fun and thought provoking and really helped me to make changes right away, in that moment.
Miss E C C Ewer-Smith, Workbook
As a mum of 3 and running two small businesses I often find my days just fill up and I end up feeling overwhelmed. I made what feels a very radical step of scheduling in a 2 hour lunch break including a nap and a walk which has actually made me far more productive. Would definitely recommend.
Rosie Freeman, Apprenticeship
This book together with Day Crafting the Change Workbook changed the way I live my day. It helped me understand what motivates me and what hinders me, what are the most optimum times for me to do creative work and radically improved my self-care. Highly recommend.
Sarah Best, Workbook
The course could have been superficial and light-weight; instead it has proven to be substantial, thoroughly researched and challenging. Bruce is passionate about the subject and delivers the course with compassion and humour. The exercises have the potential to create not just quick fixes for fun, but real long term happiness.
Ian Gregory, Apprenticeship
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Day Crafting, but it has been more than I could have hoped for. I have so much to take away, and I already feel the impact of what I have been taught. I am learning to craft my days for good, not just for myself but so that I am a benefit to others.
Rev. Judith Holliman, Apprenticeship
The Day Crafting apprentice course is excellent. It has helped me create life-giving daily rhythms and confidence in how to best schedule my days for work, rest and play. The simple art of setting an intention for the day can lead into a day that feels more giving and constructive.
Matt Freer, Apprenticeship
Bruce's course is a goldmine of wisdom, experience and practical tools to help craft your days. Living a more intentional life, not a busier life was my goal when I joined the course and Bruce offered so much useful information to help me achieve this. I have plenty of material to reflect on for months to come.
Anna Macdonald, Apprenticeship
This final book in the Daycrafting series has helped me navigate a couple of relatively small changes very successfully. The principles apply to the much bigger picture of the whole of our life and its meaning and purpose. The book made me notice things that I do without thinking and then gave really practical steps to making the most of my strengths.
Discerning, Workbook
Fascinating, practical, captivating. I love the concept of Day Crafting, all the handbooks are clear, digestible and easy to use. Bloody brilliant.
Emily Denham, Workbook
I really enjoyed this book. Day crafting is a combination of inspirational thinking and achievable practical application of that thinking. This book won’t change your life, but it really can give you the tools to do so yourself.
Bryce Travers, Workbook
It's a manageable 101 pages packed with practical ideas, exercises, activities and tools for bringing a craftsperson's approach to your days. It turns time into intentionally designed periods in which to make meaningful progress rather than mindlessly reacting to demands on your time and energy. It's an excellent overview of the practice.
GP, Workbook
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Craft days with intention.
Craft days to balance your energy and commitments.
Craft days to focus on what matters.
Craft days to maximise your strengths.
Craft days to manage and reduce stress.
Craft days to contain more delight, pleasure and play.
Craft days to build towards extraordinary achievements.
Craft days to become fitter, smarter, happier, healthier.
Craft days to develop super-powered confidence, presence, trust and heartfulness.
“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
Recent blog posts:
“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look . To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
Henry David Thoreau
