Key habits of highly effective designers
To drive impact at scale — plan your design work
How to manage your design projects by planning for the number one resource–yourself.
Planning often gets a bad rep. We often think of plans as rigid structures that fall apart as soon as the plan makes contact with reality. That’s not the type of planning we’ll be talking about here.
I’d like to show you how you can use a lightweight form of planning to be more effective in shipping high-quality design work consistently. Good plans help you think through alternative scenarios and provide options when changes inevitably occur.
If you want to do more strategic work—get better at planning.
Over time plans become obsolete but the activity of planning is indispensable as it helps you think through trade-offs in time and resources. By developing the ability to deliver on your commitments on time, you’ll be able to take on larger projects, coordinate resources, and ship big wins.
Now you might think — I work in a high-speed startup or I’m the only designer—who cares about planning. It’s true, small companies move fast and objectives change all the time. Even in this situation having a rough plan shared with the team ensures that you’re working on the right things.
Here are three types of plans I use to navigate work:
- Weekly plan—the most concrete of them all, useful in reconciling major goals with actual time to do the work
- Quarterly plan—best for spotting early resource issues and planning multiple projects spanning multiple weeks
- Yearly plan—useful for rough sizing major projects that span multiple quarters and while spotting any contingencies
Weekly plan
Before the week starts, I usually sit down to write down key things that I need to accomplish. I do this activity either on Friday or early Monday morning. These are some questions you should consider when planning the week:
- What are the big 2 or 3 key goals for the week?
- What other to-dos that need to get done?
- Are there any outstanding questions that prevent me from taking action?
I write down answers in my sketchpad and that serves as my rough plan throughout the week. I also add these objectives to the calendar as a meeting invite which serves as a reminder whenever I glance at my calendar.
Lastly, I schedule time for myself to do the work. Usually, these are 1 hour to 3 hours blocks of uninterrupted focus time. In the next article, I’ll get more into how you can protect your design time to deliver consistently.
Weekly retrospective
As the week wraps up, I do a brief retro every Friday around 5pm. This ritual is a key feedback loop to help me improve. Here are some questions to consider asking yourself:
- Did I complete the 2 or 3 must-haves you set out to do?
- How much did I accomplish?
- Were there any surprises?
- What went well?
- What went poorly?
Plans are hard to get right from the start. To get better at this I recommend you take a screenshot of your plan at the beginning of the week and then once at the end. This exercise will help you compare and contrast how you fared.
At a high level, the retro is black and white—either things got done or not. But digging into the why is more interesting. There’s usually deeper learning that happens here—it’s not “if only I didn’t get interrupted by X I would be further ahead”. But more like, “on this day it’s likely I’ll get a new task so I should build a buffer for this next week”.
These learnings create takeaways that I apply to next week’s planning thus creating a process that is continually improving.
Quarterly plan
Beyond the weekly plan comes the quarterly plan. I don’t plan monthly as it doesn’t offer as much value and a quarter is already short: breaking it down by week leads to 12 increments whereas a 2-week sprint gives us 6 sprints to account for.
The sprint by sprint view into a quarter provides an overview into your own capacity and is an early signal where you might be overcommitted. This type view works well when combined with plans of your fellow teammates in engineering and research making sure everyone is in lock-step.
Week by week view
You can also break down the quarter week by week. The granularity of this view can be helpful not just in mapping out the future but also in recording the past to capture any ad hoc projects that may have come up on top of work that you’ve already committed to.
This is why it’s key to add a buffer to projects. Even if you can execute quickly— other unforeseen projects and issues may come up.
Break projects down
The quarterly plan works well when you can break down a project into its parts. This will help you avoid planning fallacies that happen from being overly optimistic leading to unnecessary stress trying to hit a self-imposed aggressive deadline.
As an example here’s how you can break down a research study:
- Week 1: write a high-level research plan, building prototypes, write a moderator guide, scheduling participants
- Week 2: moderate and take notes, synthesize research
- Week 3: formal read-out of findings
Finally, don’t forget to account for out of office days and holidays and consider taking at least a few days off after a big project to get some rest and recovery. Taking time off to clear your mind will help you be more productive and tackle big challenges with gusto in the long-term.
Yearly plan
The yearly plan provides an opportunity to step back from the day to day minutiae and to think broadly about projects and key objectives for the year. I usually like to sketch these out on a whiteboard and record any relevant questions or data points. The activity of the plan is just as, if not more important than the plan itself.
This plan is extremely fluid. If I’m writing this plan at the beginning of the year, sometimes the 4th quarter might not even get filled out and the projects in Q2 may shift too.
This plan also uncovers various dependencies or synergies that need to be properly timed early on in the year. I usually draw these out with arrows to show how various projects impact each other.
Planning your career growth
The yearly plan is also an opportunity to step back and think about career growth. You should ask yourself questions such as:
- What are my areas of growth that I’m interested in developing?
- What are some of my key strengths that are underutilized? Are there more suitable projects where I can make a more meaningful impact?
- Where do I see myself going next?
Often these goals should serve as inputs for your one-on-one with your manager. Ideally there’s a nice fit between your strengths, growth areas and the work at hand that’s valuable to the org. However sometimes that’s not always the case and you may need to look for side projects or external courses to round out your learning.
Finally, some career objectives may take over a year to complete. These could be big moves that you’re trying to make, e.g. going from a junior designer to a design lead. Having a future(s) yearly plan will help you prioritize the day to day work to get to your ultimate objective.
Plan or be planned
Planning is a powerful tool helping you predict the future, foresee issues, and respond accordingly. Taking control over your time provides autonomy and ultimately leads to higher satisfaction rather than reacting ad-hoc to the tasks that show up in your queue.
As you get better with planning your schedule you’ll be able to take on more complex projects with ambiguous requirements, many stakeholders, and tight deadlines. But to get there you must learn how to plan and execute on your work first.
By taking the time to plan, we shape our future.
Reversal
In a few rare instances, planning may be detrimental. The environment may be highly dynamic with projects shifting or new priorities coming up unexpectedly. Overplanning may put you at a disadvantage.
However even in these chaotic situations, you can still reap some benefits by properly mapping out your time with a weekly plan or quarterly week-by-week plan so you don’t stretch yourself too thin with new commitments.
Speaking of time, in the next article of Key habits of highly effective designers, we’ll cover some best practices on design time management with tips on how to protect your time, maximize the hours that you have in order to deliver high quality work consistently.
