If you're a graphic designer, you'll already know that "kerning" refers to making tiny adjustments to the spaces between letters. If you're not, there's a strong possibility you won't care. But either way I suspect you'll see why I was sceptical about a new book entitled Life Kerning: Creative Ways To Fine Tune Your Perspective On Career & Life, which treats kerning as a metaphor for living. No offence to the designers I've known, but they tend to be neat-freaks with an obsessive attention to detail (and stylish spectacles). These are excellent attributes for the job, but are they really a recipe for happiness? Most of us could do with a bit less perfectionism and a bit more acceptance of those parts of life that, metaphorically speaking, will always be in badly-kerned Comic Sans.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book, by the Chicagoan designer Justin Ahrens, is a solid collection of antiperfectionistic advice – a font of wisdom, even. Ahrens doesn't overstretch his metaphor. He uses it to argue for "creating space" around the elements of your life by, say, planning short retreats to gain perspective, and to emphasise that small changes – a tiny tweak to a routine – might make all the difference between an awkward life and a beautiful one. "We tend to think sweeping changes need to be made," he writes, yet "it's often the fine adjustments between the smaller details… that tend to make the headlines of our lives seem… not as harmonious as they could be".

The notion that designers might have much to teach the rest of us has swept the business world. "Design thinking", to paraphrase its leading proponent, Roger Martin, means thinking that focuses on creating better things, while "analytical thinking", which is standard in business, is choosing between things. Sometimes, design thinking literally means what we colloquially mean by "design": the careers blogger Penelope Trunk argued recently that the past 20 years, dominated by email, favoured good writers, while new technologies mean "you will be more valuable and more relevant if you can think in terms of visuals". More broadly, design thinking refers to seeing things as systems, and shifting perspective to break out of predetermined grooves.

There's legitimate eyeball rolling to be done here. "The idea," writes one sceptical designer, Peter Merholz, "is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained, turtleneck-wearing creatives, 'ideating' tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth." Besides, creatives can be narrow-minded, too: studies on "architectural myopia" have shown architects literally see the world differently from laypeople, which may explain why they so often design buildings people hate using.

Still, there's something appealing about treating life as a design project: it's less cringe-inducing than "life as a work of art", yet more free-spirited than life as a to-do list. Most lives are too messy to think in terms of a blank canvas. But thinking in terms of elegantly arranging interlocking items is practical, while leaving space for real creativity. There's an old joke about designers, which I'd always taken as teasing them for being truculent, but perhaps on reflection it's more flattering: how many designers does it take to change a lightbulb? "Why does it have to be a lightbulb?"

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman

• This column was corrected on 6 December 2011. In the original, Justin Ahrens was referred to as Jason Ahrens.