Boost your design productivity

Five tips to improve your efficiency and effectiveness

In the previous three articles in this key habits of highly productive product designers series, we talked about how designers can build strong relationships by externalizing their work, focusing on progress > perfection, and the importance of planning to drive impact. We’ll build on these lessons here, especially with planning, by looking into some techniques and strategies you can use to be more efficient and effective in your work.

If you’re looking to grow in your role fast, you’ll need to over-deliver and show that you’re ready for that promotion. However, relying on old habits may can sometimes end up backfiring as we find ourselves strapped for time. It can be a delicate balance of signing up yourself for more work to exceed objectives only to find yourself spread too thin in the end.

What’s the best way to strike that right balance of consistently overachieving without burning yourself out?

In this article, we’ll get into several areas of work-life that you can combine for a powerful effect:

1. Manage your energy — take advantage of natural times in the day when you feel energized and take breaks
2. Make time for deep work — time box your work, heed Parkinson’s law, stay motivated with micro objectives, and take breaks to recover
3. Reign in the meetings — pick up the phone, enforce boundaries, set meeting objectives, and allocate a no-meeting zone
4. Plan your work — under schedule yourself and overestimate the complexity of a task, do more bottom-up planning vs. top-down
5. Triage — reassess your priorities

1. Manage your energy

We sometimes fall into the trap of treating time as an equal unit where the stretch from 8am to 10am is the same as 5pm to 7pm. We’re not a machine; our energy levels rise and fall throughout the day. A focused 1-hour with no distractions is not the same as four individual 15-minute blocks scattered throughout the day.

Time is not equal, our energy levels ebb and flow throughout the day

In Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational, the author cites a study where judges were less likely to give bail before lunch time compared to after. So what does this mean for design? When we’re exhausted or hungry, there’s usually a tendency to stick to what’s safe and not push the boundaries. So do the healthy things you already know you should do. This means getting adequate rest and nutrition to keep yourself alert.

Find your baseline

To understand your energy level and how it’s affected it helps to get a baseline first. If you’re familiar with the experience sampling method — you can try the following experiment on yourself. Throughout the day, set a timer (ideally these can be random 4 to 6 timers throughout the day and jot down:

• Date and time
• Your (subjective) energy level on a scale of 1 to 10 at that time
• What you were doing at that moment
• Any other notes or thoughts

This exercise can be time consuming, I recommend doing it for a week to see how you’re doing. Once you have a clear baseline and an idea of what drains or boosts your energy — you can start to think about your time more strategically. When I did this exercise myself, I found to be more productive in the mornings tired in the afternoons but re-energized after conversations with other designers later in the day.

Discover and optimize your own routine

As an example of when time management and energy levels come together for me — generally over the past couple of months I’ve established a quiet morning routine for myself. Usually, this is time from 7 to 10 or 8 to 10 that I block off to focus on a problem without any interruptions. I’m purposefully off of Slack and logged off other media, so that I don’t get distracted by anything else. Around 9:50 or when the design critique is about to start (at 10) I start logging in. By that time I feel like I’ve already made a decent dent on a project.

Your 9am may feel different from my 9am

Your routine may be different. By taking the time to study your habits, trying different methods, you can optimize the routines that suit your needs best.

2. Make time for deep work

If you’re an individual contributor, time is your most valuable asset. As a maker, you need the time to think, reflect and come up with solutions. In short, you need uninterrupted time to do “deep work”. This concept comes from Cal Newport’s book by the same name. The core idea from the book is to have time for deep (and at times mentally exhausting) work coupled with meaningful rest.

Sometimes creative work can feel like it’s barely progressing before a breakthrough is achieved

Design progress isn’t linear. Often times in the early stages there’s a lot of back and forth that happens when it comes to understanding the problem. The output is slow. But the once the foundation has been figured out, the solutions come fast. To get there, we need to “pay” this foundational tax and plan our work accordingly.

Work expands to fill up available time

Time box your work

According to Parkinson’s law, work expands to fill up all the available time it’s given. Give a task 4 hours with no defined constraints? It’ll easy turn into a 4 hour task. Add a mix of imposter syndrome and perfectionism into the mix and the 4-hour task may easily turn to 8 hours. So it’s important to chunk the work out.

My best work comes from committing to a problem for a full 1.5 to 2 hours. During that time I sketch, write, and design. At the end of this block of time I noticed my output is much better than if I were to work on the same problem in interrupted 30 minute blocks throughout.

Set up the most important meetings, with yourself, by blocking time for deep work

I use my calendar to manage these time blocks, essentially scheduling meetings with myself. Sometimes I just put these meeting blocks down as “Work” but as I get a better sense of the daily deadlines I rename them to specific projects or key objectives I want to accomplish. If I need key information quickly I’ll add to the event’s description.

No Slack zone

To achieve true deep work, I sometimes pause notifications or turn off Slack completely. This is easier to do especially in the mornings when most folks are still getting up and getting ready to start the day.

Set micro objectives

Often times when you’re working on a big project, it’ll take a significant amount of time to achieve breakthrough. It may feel demotivating to work for so long and see so little progress. One way to make this progress visible is to break out your deep focus time further and set a specific objective for each time block.

Chunk out your work into a mini Sprint

Let’s take an example task. You might have a 3-hour block that you’d like to spend on competitive analysis. One way you can break this out is by identifying key competitors and analogs for the first hour. Then do a deep dive for 45 minutes, take a break and recap for 30 minutes on the learnings.

It’s up to you how to structure your time. Having clear objectives for your time slots will help you see progress and move this boulder of a project further, one rock at a time. Even if you don’t get the timing right — at least you now have a clear delta between the plan and the actual execution.

Harness recovery time to be more productive

Design can be exhausting. You may start off on a simple feature problem and quickly discover many more problems and issues along the way. Like a hydra, you hack away at one problem only to see two more pop up in its place.

Don’t discount the power of breaks.

Inspiration usually strikes us in the least likely places. We’ll get that aha moment in the shower. In a hazy state of waking up we may start to see something resembling a solution. To get to this breakthrough — we still need to put in a ton of hours and work ahead of time. It’s usually after we’ve exhausted ourselves, hit the wall, walked away from the problem that we start to see new perspectives and opportunities for a solution. In the background, the mind works its magic connecting disparate ideas leading to new insight.

So how does this look like in a day? Personally, since I do my best work in the mornings I usually try to take a longer lunch break in the middle of the day (sometimes up to 1 hour) to disconnect and come back to a problem with fresh ideas. I sometimes mix this break up by taking a walk which in turn helps me avoid the post-lunch slump.

How do you stay productive?

In the next part we’ll cover tips on how to: reign in the meetings, plan your work, and reassess your priorities through triage.

Boost your design productivity, part 2

You may already have some of these activities incorporated in your workflow. Or perhaps there’s one that you found that works really well — if so, feel free to share.

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