Hack yourself — a lazy designer’s POV, and a bit of Figma

Are you ready and lazy enough (you will fully understand with continue reading this)? Coffee and tea next to you? Alright. This article is going to (not) kick you in your a**. It will be a bit of ‘lesson learned’, for sure a bit of FIGMA, and a bit of staying curious.

It’s about waking up and realizing: Yesterday I repeated the same thing over and over again:

Time to hack yourself.

Repeated smth. in your routine, your work tools, or your meetings? This is where you truly shall become ‘lazy’. You heard it right. Consider yourself as the laziest person. Laziness shall become your new way of continuously learning.

First things first. I for myself learned it the hard way. Being diligent as a UX designer won’t trigger yourself to find the smartest solutions out there. That’s why it’s time for

Tip number one: Be a couch potato! (Finding Solutions)

1. Hack yourself tip number one

Become the laziest couch potato and start reading smart books!
You almost burn 0 calories (be proud of yourself being so lazy), your cactus won’t be afraid of you to get overwatered, your thumb muscle is trained enough by scrolling down newsfeeds, and your brain is getting lazy-smarter from printed literature than learning from screens:

The study, titled, Reading on Paper and Digitally: What the Past Decades of Empirical Research Reveal, shows that students learn more powerful from print textbooks than screens (such a lazy quote — you will fully understand when you continue reading).

Next tip: Write down your learnings. (Research)

2. Hack yourself tip number two

Collect your quotes and learnings in a written (concept) form.
This will let you remember best, helps to form opinions, and strategies to tackle your next challenge at work. I can totally assure, that next small talk or Pecha Kucha is around the corner (true story).

Which leads me to one of my favourite (lazy) quotes from the book:
The subtle art of not giving a f*** by Mark Manson.

Know your values

“Don’t hope for a life without problems. There’s no such thing.
Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”

Which leads to

3. Hack yourself tip number three

Own the problems, and accept them is going to be the key to choose your next best (lazy) values.
Do a daily or weekly analysis to get a better understanding of possible hacking opportunities in your routines. Here is an experimental FIGMA template, that I created to become more efficiently lazy (or because you were lazy enough to read this article — lazy fist bump — you’re getting this for free).
Free Hack yourself diary template: Click-press-this-link!

Get yourself this lazy template.

4. And this is the fourth hack yourself tip

Get less hands-off and become lazy hands-on.

You’re reviewing and QA-ing a lot. Then this is prob a good example of how to tackle repetitions. If you are recognizing repetitive workarounds or experiencing too many clicks to get things done: Become lazy! Tackle those workarounds like a UX Designer and solve them. You can make it.

Here’s an example coming from our product design team:
The FIGMA revamping of naming conventions for typography and colours to improve the workflow.

To get rid of the ‘too many clicks to see more details of the styles’, we needed more detailed design tokens.

Creating a sandbox for your team is a good usability test for your new naming conventions, that finally shows font size (px), font-weight and hex code for colours.

The new naming conventions for our styles. You can now easily see everything you want with ONE click. You don't need to ‘detach’ the style or click into CSS to see them.

The new naming conventions for our colours. Same here: You can see easily the hex code ensuring consistent usage.

OMG: FIGMA launched a new update on showing font size/line-height/weight a couple of days later. At least the work for colours was a full success and not a waste of time.

5. Last but not least: The Super nerd tip of hacking yourself

Have you ever thought of creating real-life plugins for yourself?

Just couldn’t stop thinking of it.
I mean you could become even nerdier.

I leave you alone with those thoughts…and your coffee… Hope to see you again in my next article. Tschüss, bye and let’s stay curious!