Weekly Recap #11: Organizing My Sh*t

It’s very ironic that prior to me writing this, I fell into a McGregor vs. Mayweather rabbit hole for about an hour. There goes my productivity.
I don’t even care about boxing. 💁🏻
The freshest perspectives (feat. Trav and Los)
“so fresh it’s almost organic”
It’s been a couple weeks coming, but I finally had the chance to meet up with Trav and Los in person to chat. Turns out they actually knew the person that had referred me to them (thanks, Preston 👏🏻). Great guys, by the way. And the best part is this: what I had initially thought was going to be a simple conversation where we talk about our respective podcasts turned out to be an invitation to guest-star on an episode. Pretty darn neat, if you ask me.

Being able to chat with seasoned…podcasters was something that I’ve been wanting to do since Up+Coming took off. I mean our show is a lot more constrained due to the fact that it’s all done via Bumpers, but I was curious to know how they went about structuring their episodes (turns out they record a single take and break it up into two…genius). We got to dive into my background a little, the podcast a little and y’know what, let’s just wait ‘till Tuesday to hear the episode in all its freshness (you’ll understand soon).
Anyway, would highly recommend checking them out and hearing what they have to say in the world of design (as well as other things related to creative media)! And we may be in the works of joining their podcast network, Tin Roof Media, so fingers crossed! 🤞🏻
OOOH, the Suck-It-Universe Edition (feat. Cat Noone)
“we will show the universe who the true alpha is”
As I mentioned in a previous recap, I was lucky enough to be chosen for Out of Office Hours this month (second time around…how do they know I haven’t leveled up in the design world yet???). After an unlucky bout of email tag, we were finally able to chat! Got to really pick her brain with some more specific questions, some related to design, others more around her ability to manage her time. Design time, as she calls it.

It might have been a little more unorthodox not asking her things like, “how should I prepare my portfolio,” or “what was it like working for _____.” But, I figured that answers to those questions can have a tendency to become repetitive the more you ask designers. Previous OOOHs that I got to be a part of left me with good advice, but it was advice I’d already heard or read elsewhere.
So it was during our call that I realized I’ve never really asked designers things like, “how do you find yourself managing your work life and your relationship life?” or “what motivated you to continue working on ______ when there was an existing app in the market already?” And as Cat bluntly put it, you gotta figure out your top priorities, hone in on them, and get shit done. Rid yourself from the distractions. Block out time and commit to the task at hand. But also, forget about working on the weekends. Live a little. 😜
Revising my workflow 📝
when you want everything in an all-in-one app but can’t
My conversation with Cat sparked in me a new desire to reorganize my life. To cut the fat that was causing me to lose hours of productivity (I’m looking at you, Twitter) and really think about what was important, and worth putting my time and effort into.
Cause let’s just run through the list of things I currently have on my plate:
- Work @ Cisco, 40 hours a week (although not all of it is work, heh)
- UX Research @ Oppia, 4–6 hours a week
- Podcasting, 2 hours a week
- PM’ing @ Quora for Tritons, 2–4 hours a week
- Side projects, ~4 hours a week
Obviously that doesn’t include other things like sleep (what’s that), having to appease familial obligations, leisurely time (*overwatch*), and spending time with my significant other. Oh, and trying to network and level up as a designer. Let’s not forget about that. So it’s a lot. At least more than I’m used to.
And the harder thing is that I’m still trying to get accustomed to running things on my own schedule. School was tougher yeah, but things had a set schedule to follow…kinda miss it. But besides the point, I spent the day trying to organize things into a cleaner workflow. This is my current set-up:

- Things for my daily to-d0s; ranging from high-priority items to more trivial tasks I need to get done. I really appreciate their aesthetic and formatting, although I find it harder to do anything other than make lists of things that need to be done.
- Bear for expanding on + more in-depth note taking of projects, priorities. Love the formatting on this as well, do wish it was easier to categorize my notes the way Evernote does it…but, I enjoy using it more.

- Plain ol’ Calendar for keeping track of events and important stuff in my life. Sometime it bounces between logging it here or via paper calendar.
- Slack for project communication; currently using it for Quora for Tritons and Oppia.
- Pen & paper; jotting down stuff in my notebook. From Framer notes (I will learn you, goddamnit) to sketching mockups for my projects, having it all centralized in a notebook helps me keep my stuff in order.


Hopefully this does me justice and gets me more productive. I mean, I spent like a whole day stressing about this and getting major anxiety (for once, lol) so this better be worth it.
Guess we’ll see~
