How I supercharged my productivity: My journey into UX and getting myself organized
Industrial designer to UX/UI and learning new skills
This post is about my ongoing journey to becoming a more productive and organized designer as I transition from freelance industrial designer to the field of UX/UI.
In spring 2020, the world was about to change drastically as the first reports of the COVID-19 virus hitting American shores on the west coast began to trickle into the news cycle and the country’s consciousness at large.
At the time, I had been living and working in Denver, Colorado, out of a one-bedroom apartment as a freelance industrial designer working remotely for a few clients, mainly in the retail interiors, point of purchase, and packaging spaces. Life out there had been pretty good; I spent weekends venturing into the Rockies, getting lost in the wilderness on long mountain bike rides, and camping out in the high desert. Of course, life as a freelancer always has its ups and downs, but for the most part, my work life was predictable and comfortable, having built a solid working relationship with the clients I had at the time.
Then a few weeks later, the lockdowns started. Then I started hearing about people losing their jobs. Then one day, I got a call saying my biggest client was freezing all work with outside vendors indefinitely, and they wouldn’t be able to continue working with me. I was stunned; I didn’t know what to do. So on Easter Sunday, 2020, I packed up my little Ford Focus with everything I could cram inside, put the rest in storage, and headed back east to New Jersey, where I grew up.
That is where this story begins. Though I enjoyed my time in the thin mountain air of Denver, deep down, I felt like I had just been coasting in my professional life. I knew I needed to make some profound changes. Ironically it was COVID that pushed me towards that much-needed change.
Back in Jersey, with lots of free time on my hands, I did something I had wanted to do for a while. I enrolled in a ten-month-long UX Bootcamp, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work.
I needed a fundamentally better way of approaching work.
Pretty quickly into my Bootcamp experience, it became increasingly clear that UX is a vast field with many different niches, methodologies, skillsets, and tools to learn, apply and explore. On top of that, I now had some headspace to reflect on how I had worked for the past five years in my freelance business. I knew that if I wanted to be effective moving forward, I would need to change how I worked, learned, and did design. The areas I felt needed the most attention in this area were;
1. Wasted Effort / Lack of Efficiency: I generally wasted a lot of time switching between programs, remembering key commands, searching for files, and doing a lot of administrative tasks that could be streamlined if I took the time to develop better workflows. This diminished my ability to do creative work.
2. Inefficient Learning Habits: There is much to learn about UX. I needed a way to retain all that I was learning without resorting to having to remember everything. I needed a way to access all the info quickly I was taking in for easy reference and recall later.
3. Lack of Direction / Motivation: I got into design, being excited about making things that I care about with other people who care about the same. I knew I needed to rediscover what motivated me to be a designer again, what I cared about, and what I wanted to be. I had a sense that this is tied to what it means to be personally productive.
4. Bad Entrenched Habits: Working as a freelancer and being paid by the hour reinforced an incentive not to figure out better ways of doing things and not to strive for more efficiency in my work. I took an “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” approach that was detrimental to my growth as a professional.
5. Information Overwhelm: I’ve always been an information junkie. One of the things I noticed about myself was that I would often read something in a book, save an article on the web, or take a note, and a week later, I’d forget everything. Then, I’d repeat the process the next day without retaining any information.
Finding my way forward. Guidance from unexpected places.
Armed with a new awareness of my blind spots and what I wanted to work on, the path forward was both deliberate and unexpected. At this point, I had finished my Bootcamp and had started to shift into job search mode for a product design or UX job.
On the deliberate effort side, I started by reading a few books to address some of the issues I had identified. Below are some of my favorites I read along the way, what I learned from each, and the problem they helped me work through.
Problem: Lack of Direction / Motivation
Book: Hero on a Mission — A Path to a Meaningful Life — Donald Miller
What I Learned: Prioritizing your day-to-day tasks starts with clarifying your long-term goals. When you know what you are aiming at, prioritizing your day becomes much easier.
Problem: Bad Entrenched Habits
Book: Atomic Habits — Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results — James Clear
What I Learned: Changing bad habits starts with replacing them with better, new ones. And the best way to build new habits is by starting small and being consistent rather than trying to change all at once massively.
Problem: Wasted Effort / Lack of Efficiency
Book: Thinking In Systems — A Primer— Donella H. Meadows
What I Learned: "Productivity” is just a small part of a much larger system of interconnected goals, motivations, habits, tools, inputs, and outputs that connect to all of life, not just work. To address being productive specifically, I would have to examine how all parts of my life overlap and influence each other.
I also investigated some tech hardware / software additions that I might add to make my workflows more efficient and streamlined. Below are some of my favorites!
Problem: Wasted Effort / Lack of Efficiency
Tech: Loupedeck Live
What does it do? It’s a hardware and software package that lets you assign custom key macros, key shortcuts, run program commands, and more. It also changes toolsets automatically when you switch programs.
Problem: Wasted Effort / Lack of Efficiency
Tech: Todoist
What does it do? It’s a streamlined to-do list software that runs on desktop / tablet and mobile, allowing you to organize and prioritize daily tasks quickly.
Problem: Information Overwhelm
Tech: Slab
What does it do? Slab lets you easily create, organize, and discover knowledge for your entire organization, from non-technical to tech-savvy. I use it to create a knowledge database for everything I want to remember and focus on after it’s been filtered through my messier notes in other apps and software. It’s my high-level north star of everything I want to focus on and remember.
On the unexpected side, while taking UX maven Sarah Doody’s Career Strategy Lab course, I serendipitously stumbled into an idea that would help pull all this effort together in the coming months. That idea was business consultant Tiago Forte’s “Second Brain” and P.A.R.A. productivity system. The idea behind it is simple. Modern knowledge workers are awash in boatloads of information coming at them every day. They need a system of organization that allows them to retain important information and turn it into actionable results. I’ll unpack this a bit more in the upcoming section and detail how it all connects. Here’s a link quickly outlining Tiago’s system from his website’s blog.
Blog Link: https://fortelabs.com/blog/basboverview/
Pulling it all together: Building & integrating a personal productivity system.
All this learning and experimentation in addressing my five main problem areas took place over a period of months. It was and still is a constant process as I keep refining and finding better ways to do things. My five problem areas coalesced into three main, overlapping parts of a more extensive productivity system, each with its own set of primary tools.
Workflow Efficiency & Automation
Hardware and software solutions are combined to reduce time lost on basic tasks like switching between programs, accessing frequently used tool sets within the software, managing a to-do list, and keeping track of time worked on a particular project.
Primary Tools: Loupedeck Live, Todoist, Microsoft Powertoys, Toggl Time Track, Make, Microsoft Power Automate
Step 1: Tap Figma on the Loupedeck touchscreen to open the program.
Step 2: In a single tap the program opens, and Loupedeck updates automatically to my preset tools for Figma.
Information Capture & Actionable Projects
This is where the “Second Brain” system comes into play. The main idea here is that I have everything I want to save, remember or work on organized by the P.A.R.A. system (Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives). Every piece of information I take in then gets categorized into one of these sections. That information then gets summarized and combined with other ideas in a new note in the same category, where I can easily find it again later. The key here is that information is saved based on how actionable it will be in the future! (“Projects” being the most actionable.)
Primary Tools: Google Keep, Microsoft One Note, Innoreader RSS, Figma, Raindrop.io, Obsidian, Google Recorder
Step 1: Content is captured / categorized with some highlights etc.
Step 2: What I learned is summarized and connected to other ideas.
Step 3: Partially developed ideas are put to use in various outputs like a blog post.
Nested Goals & Daily Tasks
By identifying my long-term goals first, I can then break those down into weekly goals. Weekly goals then break down further into actionable, bite-sized steps I can take daily. There are two other important things to keep in mind here. First, long-term goals have to have strong emotions tied to them. I need to care if I achieve them or not to pull me through inevitable ups and downs in their pursuit. Secondly, I have to have some way of measuring my progress, so I know if I am moving toward success or not.
Primary Tools: Slab, Todoist, Obsidian, Figma, Google Calendar
Conclusions: What I’ve learned along the way.
This journey in becoming more organized and productive has been exciting and has helped me grow in a myriad of ways. Here are some of the most important things I’ve learned and insightful takeaways.
1. Getting more organized helps you be more creative. Why? Creating repeatable systems that help with mentally taxing tasks frees up brain resources to approach your day less stressed and with a more curious and relaxed approach.
2. Save most incoming information (articles, tweets, blog posts, etc.) based on what current project it helps you with. I’ve learned through trial and error that if I save something without intent for how I might use that info later, it gets buried away somewhere, never to be seen again. By categorizing info based on a current project, it does two things. First, it lets ideas cross-pollinate in the same digital space, and second, it ensures those ideas are immediately actionable.
3. Getting clear on your goals helps you define and prioritize daily tasks. High-level goals break down into weekly goals, which break down into daily actionable steps I can take. This way, I am always oriented toward my long-term goals and know how to progress on them.
4. Slowly digesting research information in multiple steps means you can efficiently work on multiple projects in small chunks without getting overwhelmed. Similar to how I break down goals in conclusion #3, I take a similar approach to working on my projects as I take in research information. In step 1, I save whatever I find useful and highlight the essential parts. In step 2, I summarize in my own words what I find useful and how it might connect to other ideas or concepts. Finally, in step 3, I take those ideas and pull them together into a finished piece of content like a design presentation or blog post.
5. Paying close attention to each step in your everyday workflows helps you identify where you are not being efficient and where you can make things less mentally taxing on yourself. This realization led me to start using the Loupedeck setup I mentioned earlier. I realized a lot of my time was wasted simply switching between pieces of software, digging around, and accessing menus to engage with particular tools in each program I use daily.
What are your thoughts?
How about you? Do you have any personal productivity tools, tips, or tricks? Feel free to comment below with any questions or comments about the article or to share your thoughts.
