New Year Mindmap SeriesPart 1: A very good process that was born out of a very bad time

The seed of an idea

Sometime in the aughts, I became intrigued with the idea of doing a year-end review and planning my upcoming year. I think reading Getting Things Done had something to do with it, though, off the top of my head, now, I can’t even remember what Mr. Allen’s recommendations are for summing up your year and planning the next one.

I know that Chris Guillebeau had a lot to do with it. Somewhere, in the early days of his blog, he talked about his annual review process — and I was so terribly impressed. And intimidated. Although he’s a writer, and very creative to be sure, he does get very analytical about things in a way that doesn’t necessarily connect with how my brain works. He gave out a free spreadsheet to help you review your year and plan your next year the way he does. I studied this. I read all the comments. I wished I could think that way. But when I tried to think about what happened in the past year, my mind went blank. When I tried to think of what I wanted to accomplish in the next year, I had no idea.

I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I should be able to do these things — and that if I couldn’t, my brain was broken. So I put it on the backburner, and, each year, when Chris blogged about his yearly review, I felt kind of inadequate and dissatisfied and carried on.

A deeply personal tangent

I can say, in retrospect, that I was very wrong in my take on all this. My job involved inventing and streamlining processes for getting things done at the design studio in which I was a partner. The rest of the time, I was using design thinking and analytical frameworks to solve problems for clients and design stuff for them. Part of me knew I was very good at this. But part of me couldn’t get beyond an extreme negativity toward myself and my self-declared deficiencies.

Things got worse. And I’m not talking so much just about my inability to conduct an analytical annual review at the moment. Though we’ll come back to that.

A complicated series of events happened in my work life. It was the culmination of a bad situation that had been brewing for years. The inevitable explosion and flying debris.

I felt like every day was a fight, a trauma, a crushing blow. It was thorny, litigious, and really, more than I could take in my already deflated state. But I had to take it, and I had to keep on earning my living. And I had to keep a brave face for the outside world of my design clients, keep on doing good work for them and give the impression that everything was fine.

It took a couple years to get free from the mess. I started a new company. I handed out my new business cards and smiled, and started the process of drumming up new business.

But on the inside I was intensely burned out, and more depressed than I’d ever been, despite a lifetime struggling with depression.

I didn’t think I wanted to design anymore. I didn’t think I had a single drop of interest left in it. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do instead, or how I would find the motivation to do anything beyond the absolute necessities.

The Depression Map

It was the quiet week between Christmas and New Year in December of 2012, and I felt like it was some kind of breaking point — I would like to say turning point, but at the time, that’s not how it felt. My brain felt full, foggy, and overwhelmed. My inner monologue was on a non-stop blather that was painful to absorb. I knew I had to get some stuff out of my broken brain and look at it and see what could be done.

I had recently gotten some dieline proofs for a custom folder project that were still sitting around. These were huge sheets of paper from a plotter with black and white diagrams on one side. I flipped them over and taped them together. I laid out the huge piece of paper on my dining room table and picked up a Sharpie. In a sort of random place on the paper I scrawled Present/Future and put a box around it. Then, realizing, probably in a self-castigating way, that I should take a good look at what I’d been through over the 2012, I added, + Past Year and Lessons Learned.

I picked up my favorite black gel pen and I was off. I just started pouring stuff out, and putting it in boxes, then, drawing arrows to whatever occurred to me and writing more words and boxes. More arrows. More words. More boxes.

There was no sense of organization or order… it was pure brainstorming, and totally uncensored. If something connected, I drew an arrow. If something didn’t fit, I put it somewhere else and drew an arrow.

I won’t lie, looking back on this mindmap is painful. It is full of harsh self criticism. It is full of accusations leveled at myself with no chance of anyone defending me. But it’s also full of two really good things: questioning and blue sky ideating.

Questioning

Maybe you’ve heard of the Five Whys. Although it’s touted in lots of business contexts, it’s really as simple as thinking like a toddler until you get to the crux of a matter. You are not satisfied with the answer to the answer to your first why question — you question that answer with another why question. And that is what I did with many of my boxes and arrows. I questioned why I felt certain ways, and then asked why again. And then asked why again. Until I found something deeper — not just the negative self-talk that was playing on a continuous loop, quick to jump in with a obviously, it’s because you suck! answer. I don’t know if this helped me to feel better about myself, but at least I had some better truths down on paper than the lies I’d been repeated internally, and that has to be a step forward.

I also asked why to questions about things I was doing, planning to do, had done, or might do. Despite my depressed haze, there was a smart part of my brain somewhere that knew I needed to think about things differently and to reframe.

Dreaming

I didn’t feel like I had a lot of creative energy — or any, really — but I forced myself to remember projects I’d wanted to do back when I was in a better place. I forced myself to think back to things I wanted to do when I started college, or things I did in my spare time in high school. I strained to remember answers I might have given to what do you want to be when you grow up? before I had. I wrote these things in boxes and explored them the best I could. I suggested to myself that maybe I should somehow make the short film I’d written a screenplay for. I see I noted some favorite film directors — perhaps I was going to turn up on their doorsteps… I don’t know. I tried strings of boxes with different directions I could take my business in, trying to convince myself that the world was my oyster, even though I didn’t feel like it.

I’m sure I shot lots of my own ideas down in places, but I tried to at least give them a chance first. Writing these things down put me under no obligation to do them or to do anything. I just wanted to get the gunk out of my head.

How Big Paper Helped

This was not magic. I did come up with a lot of ideas, and I did, probably more importantly, refute some of the junk I was telling myself with very sound strings of causation that helped me understand what was going on in some kind of way.

Writing and writing and writing on that big paper, that was just not going to run out of space no matter what (and I could tape more on!) was cleansing. The actual physical process of doing it was meditative, even if some of the material I was writing was disturbing.

I worked on this thing for the better part of a week. My first pen ran out of ink and I took up a second one. I just kept going and going until I could thinking of nothing else and felt spent. Empty. A bit better.

Ultimately, it took time and therapy to really feel better. The further I got away from the bad situation that had led me to this dark period, the better I was. I kept on going with my new business and somehow, I eventually felt less burned out and more interested in design again.

One helpful thing I learned from that mindmap was that decisions are up to me. Before I drew out so many options and possible futures, I had felt like a victim. I had felt trapped, obliged, non-autonomous. But that was just a cage I’d forced myself into. It’s important to remember that any box can have lots of different arrows coming out of it, and you can choose to ignore the ones that lead to other boxes that don’t feel right, or don’t come from a place of progress and positivity.

Up Next

That was a rough time, and I don’t know if what I’ve written is remotely helpful. I know lots of people suffer with depression and feelings of burnout, so I hope that it gives you some ideas of how to reframe — or at least play with big paper. In Part Two I’ll talk about how this year end mindmap series evolved for me over the years that followed — and I promise, they are much happier stories!

Originally published at 41dots.