The first step into ToDoist zero

Productivity for busy designers 101

Have you ever spend a day full of meetings? A lot of brainstorm talks, but you haven’t shipped a pixel or progressed on your research.

I feel you.

Meetings killed my productivity, too.

Teammates were inviting me to meetings while I need to progress on my daily tasks. Teammates were asking me for tasks when I was at a conference. At a specific time, I needed to split myself in two: the designer who craft and the designer who present, give his two-cents.

Then I stopped everything, and I’ve put a few tweaks into my routine to maintain a “todoist” zero when I leave work every day and regain some sanity into my workflow and mental health. The later should be a priority into everyone’s head, by the way.

No magic trick, this is the first step into “todoist” zero *chef’s hands*

Time blocking

News alert: we can’t extend time. You may work, 6, 8, or 10 hours, you can’t do everything.

And during this time, I struggle to say no to a design task. I had to add every task at the end of my limitless todo list, or even stop everything and achieve it because you know… ASAP.

The problem is that I had a list for tasks, and an agenda mainly for meetings and workshops: I had a to-do list full of urgent tasks but a schedule that doesn’t represent that workload.

Value your design tasks now.

First use ToDoist, or any ToDo list that can sync to your agenda. And attach every task to a slot on your schedule.

Doing this, you ensure yourself to block time to do the task while preventing last-minute meetings.

Automate your workflow

Insights from your team or end-users are gold for your product development. But it can be time-consuming.

Working on AI-assistants, we’ve created a bot on Slack for our Customer Success Managers, which gather themselves user feedback, that can capture ideas and create a standard Trello Card.

Gather insights are not the only things on your workflow that can be automated. Zapier is your best friend. If you have to do the same thing two times on the same day, the second one thinks automation.

For example, with Zapier, I’ve created a template checklist linked to tags into my Trello Board to standardize the process to follow according to the label, which indicates the type of design work to do (New feature, iteration, hotfix, …).

Monthly meetings with your team should aim to iterate on your process and deploy little automation to reduce friction, error, and time-consuming tasks.

Every avoided meeting is a victory

If corporations should be a country, useless meetings will be a national sport.

Meetings are an art. It takes a lot of effort and methodology to master it and achieve a productive one.

I won’t teach you this art; I’m still learning a lot. But I can help you avoid useless meetings like a boss, and don’t feel like a dick with your colleagues.

Just reverse-engineer what makes a great meeting to avoid the useless one. Use the framework from futurice.

Ask if the person has all the insights to be able to make decisions at the end of the meeting if there’s a clear agenda if your presence will add value to the discussion, and ultimately if the meeting could not be just an e-mail.

But the stars line up and all the requirements are checked, you should be present and perform like anything. You can’t just be picky and still sleep at meetings. 😏

Valuing your time is always a good idea.

Having a bias for action while being stubborn on value and growth are a must when working at a startup — and those hacks saved my corporate life as a solo designer.

Are those tips helpful to you? Tell me. For any reclamations, you can talk to my bot. Ah.