4 things you can do today to start organizing your design work

Handy resources and tested tips to take control of your work

As designers, a lot of us get joy out of bringing order to chaos. Cleaning up the clutter, introducing symmetry, and bringing alignment are some of the many fundamentals we work with to solve design problems. As time goes on, things around us grow, both in number and in size. This is true for almost anything from our home to our projects at work. It is easy to get overwhelmed, but instilling a little organization can help alleviate that feeling.

Being organized can mean multiple things at an individual level as all of us are different and function in our unique ways. As a non-expert, it feels insincere to even attempt to define ‘organizing.’ Therefore, I’ll try to summarize some of the many advantages of organizing:

• You get a sense of being in control
• Makes you efficient and therefore more productive as you’re quick to reach any item you need
• Tidy, organized spaces aren’t just aesthetically pleasing, they make you look more professional

Now, you might wonder: yeah this is all good, but I’m not an inherently organized person. I might kill at producing a stellar symmetrical visual artwork but I’m not exactly someone who’ll group my snacks at home and store them in labeled bins. And that’s okay. Being organized is not about personality, it’s more like a trait that can be learned and even mastered with time. You needn’t be so obsessed with organizing that you feel compelled to group and label anything and everything. You just do enough to make things easier for you.

In this article, I’ll share 4 simple ideas and rituals that have worked for me in my 5 years of professional design career to help me stay in control of my work. The scope is limited to project organization from a designer’s perspective, but these ideas can be extrapolated to other roles.

#1 — Files and folders

As our projects grow over time, so does the number of spreadsheets, docs, slide decks, and other artifacts. We tend to make folders by projects to keep connected artifacts grouped. If you’re anything like me, it’s hard to remember what did you name that ‘desk research doc’ months or even weeks after you stopped actively working on it. The search bar is my ally, but keywords renege on my ephemeral memory. When you find yourself in a situation like this, the ability to narrow down the search space helps a lot.

✅ DO

• If you’re working in a shared space like google drive and are not in control of all the shared files, create shortcuts to every relevant file created/owned by others on your team and pool them with files created by you under the dedicated project folder that you maintain for your work
• Use prefixes in the name to categorize folders. For instance, I used prefixes [Event], [Medium], and [Research] to split my event work, general product research work, and medium article work

List view of google drive folders synced to mac

• Use a naming system that you can map to something familiar like the sitemap of the product you’re working on

Here is a simple example: The CLM product I worked on had a global nav on top with tabs for product sections wherein the Admin section had multiple pages outlined on the sidebar.

Screen-grab of the Admin section of DocuSign CLM app

My folders in google drive for the CLM product followed this naming format which had a 1:1 mapping with the product pages. All I needed was to sort them by name to narrow my search when looking for a specific file.

<Product Section> - <Page>

List view of folders on google drive

❌ DON’T

• Go overboard with grouping to create 5–6 levels of nested folders. It’s not a pleasant experience going through 7 folders to get to one file.
• Break existing conventions. For instance, if your team has a way of naming Figma files, follow those rules. If you feel they don’t work, you can always propose your own convention for the team to review.

#2 — Ticketed and non-ticketed Design Work

In an agile environment, you find yourself spreading work across sprints as you collaborate with PMs, engineers, researchers, copywriters, and other stakeholders on your team. In my team’s workflow, we use JIRA to document and assign design stories/tasks which have 2-week sprint-based deadlines. While JIRA is a powerful tool to keep track of ongoing work, it is a little hard for me to get a report of my historical work. Moreover, I’m terrible at writing SQL queries, which leaves me at a disadvantage when I’m trying to quickly find that ticket I worked on 2 years ago to share with a co-worker.

In order to save me the trouble of digging up details on JIRA, I started a weekly ritual where I’d log all my ticketed and non-ticketed work in a spreadsheet arranged in yearly tabs with the following details:

• Story/Task title
• Ticket/JIRA Link (if applicable)
• Project links (Figma design file, Google Drive folder, etc)
• Date assigned
• Date completed
• Time is taken (duration between completed date and assigned date in #days)
• Difficulty/Level of Effort/Points (can be subjective)
• Delays (changes in priority, scope, etc)
• Learning/Notes (aberrations, feedback, mistakes)

This has helped me, quickly get to and reflect on historical work and its related content by using a simple [Cmd+F] in the spreadsheet. As I work on retros or yearly lookbacks, I’m able to source data about accomplishments, opportunities for improvement, and next steps by looking at this spreadsheet.

Screen-grab of active weekly progress tracker spreadsheet

In case you wanted to do something similar, here’s a ➡️ template for weekly work tracking to get you started.

#3 — Quarterly Retro and Self-evaluation

An important piece of growing in your role is the ability to reflect on the past and use the learnings to do things better in the future. As you set goals for next year or prepare for your annual performance review, do you find yourself missing out on reporting some amazing little things you might have done? I’ve been there too, which led me to a simple documenting ritual that solved the FOMO for me.

For every quarter, I note down the following in reverse chronological order on a document that I update biweekly:

• 🏆 Accomplishments (Projects completed with links to final deliverables, Talks given, Events attended/organized, Side projects, Educational Courses taken)
• ☝️Opportunities to improve (What didn’t go well, What could have been done differently)
• 👞 Next Steps (Goals for next quarter)

The themes may vary but as long as you can build up a habit of periodically documenting your work, it will prove fruitful in the long run. If you’d like to try out my format, ➡️ here’s the template.

#4 — Planning ahead

I work in several teams with different dynamics and planning at an enterprise level is often top-down where we align our work to business needs and leadership goals. In an agile environment, I work with multiple units of time — sprints, releases, quarters, fiscal and it can get difficult to comprehend how to scope out work under each of those buckets. As I do more strategic work, the need to define the work at all of those levels becomes more important. Therefore, it helps to map out how those agile units of time translate into each other and into the units of time I understand better such as months weeks, dates.

Taking an example of DocuSign, this is how our agile numbers work:

• 1 sprint = 2 weeks
• 1 internal release = 3–4 sprints
• 1 year = 3 public releases OR 4 quarters

(very confusing, I know!)

But what if we created a visual roadmap and mapped all of these together with specific dates to estimate how long we’d be working a certain project? Wouldn’t it make it easy to drive conversations like:

“How many sprints do you estimate it takes you to finish this project?”

“How many projects did you work on in this public release/quarter?”

Screen-grab of active yearly design roadmap spreadsheet

Again, this might be different for every team, but ➡️ here’s a template if you like this Gantt-chart style of organizing projects.

Knowledge is power and the more you know what’s coming, the easier it is to make projections and elicit time estimates for your work. Being on top of work planning allows you to handle unknowns better. It makes you efficient in revising, updating, and adjusting. With greater control, you’d be able to decompress and channel your energy into delivering efficacious results.

Resources shared

• Template 1: Weekly work progress tracker
• Template 2: Quarterly self-reflection
• Template 3: Yearly design roadmap

⭐️ Thanks to Jake Mitchell for editing this article.

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