A Solo Side Project: Building an AI channel summaries feature for Slack before Slack had one

2023… it seems like a lifetime ago! In March of that year, chatGPT had just landed a few months earlier and AI still felt very much like magic. At the time, I was trying to level up my UX problem solving skills, so I joined a mentorship program called Kickass UX with two guys who had been designers at the software company Smartsheet. Colton and Ludovic really encouraged myself and the others they were mentoring at the time to really think deeply about what sorts of problems we wanted to tackle as product designers.

After some soul searching and reflection, I ended up with this fascination of the problem of “digital noise” and information overload as it exists in productivity and team communication software. As a freelance designer who has worked remotely with different teams and in different contexts most of my career, this was something I discovered I was really interested in as its something I’ve experienced and had to deal with first hand!

So, after some digging around online on some product forums and review sites, I decided to build a case study around a problem Slack users were voicing concerns about. They were concerned that Slack was becoming way too overwhelming to keep up with and that it was actually preventing them from getting their work done. Five interviews, five users tests and twelve weeks later I had built an AI based channel summary feature that would give users their time and sanity back. Nine months later Slack actually launched a very similar AI channel summaries feature as part of their core product.

Beyond the Chatbox: Why Prompting is a High-Friction UX Trap

In the paragraphs below we’ll take a look at some of the decisions I made regarding AI in early 2023 just as the chatGPT phenomenon was getting started through the lens of the state of AI in early 2026. Do the decisions I made then hold up in the era of the AI slop? Let’s dive in and find out.

We’ll start at the top. The highest level design decision at the time in 2023 was the decision to move from a chat based AI interface (which is mostly what existed in productivity products at the time) to a more targeted UI based flow with a few simple decision points. The thinking at the time was to eliminate the “blank page effect” A chat based interface ends up being a high barrier of entry. Users have to think first carefully of exactly the output they want. Instead, with a UI based input users could simply make a few guided clicks and return back exactly the info they needed to push their projects forward.

Looking back in 2026 I can confidently say this was the right decision as validated by Nielsen Norman groups article “AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years” In this article they note that prompting is essentially a return to the command line, it’s a high-friction interaction model that relies on user recall rather than recognition. In plain English this basically just means it’s mentally harder to use, because of what I just described in the paragraph above. With a chat based interface you have to think about how to prompt the system into returning what you want which is unnecessary friction.

Fighting Input Dilution: The Case for Targeted Data Scope

Another key decision I made in 2023 was limiting users to 1–5 channels per summary output. There were two things driving this design decision initially. One by limiting channel summaries to specific channels this would cut down on any unnecessary AI compute costs. Secondly my interviews revealed that most Slack users had a only a handful of channels that really needed to pay attention to out of the perhaps 50 or more that they were actually subscribed to. So this tool would help them get up to date on only their most important channels they actually cared about in one go.

From a 2026 perspective this decision actually proves to be a fairly interesting one! Initially the decision I made was about not wasting compute and letting users get caught up on multiple channels with AI summaries in one click. Here’s what's interesting about this architecture through the lens of the 2026 AI landscape. The concept is called “input dilution” It turns out with these sorts of AI summaries, if there is too much input information the output summaries end up not being very helpful because they can tend to overgeneralize and miss important info. This gets worse the more info you feed an AI. So this is yet another reason why limiting summaries to smaller batches of input leads to a higher quality experience.

The DM Firewall: Protecting the Public Well from Recursive AI Decay

Let’s look at one final example of a design decision from the initial feature set. I made the call to ONLY allow specific elements of generated summaries to be shared and forwarded via DM rather than shareable links to entire summaries or the ability to share them to another channel. Back then, the support for this was built off of two competing tradeoffs that I was working through. The first came from a direct quote from a tech COO I had interviewed. She said at the time “The big thing for me with AI is, if it becomes flat, and I can’t push it forward to the next person, it’s not as helpful if only I can engage with it.” On the other hand, the core user problem I was solving for was this problem of information overload. I knew I needed to architect the system in such a way that these summaries could be both genuinely useful while at the same time not contribute to the very problem they were trying to solve.

In retrospect in 2026, this turned out to perhaps have been the most important design decision I made on this entire project. In mid 2024 the term “workslop” entered the cultural zeitgeist. Workslop is defined as the byproduct of “frictionless” AI tools that prioritize the generation of communication over the clarity of information. Without knowing it, this was exactly the problem I was intuiting back in early 2023.

There is another angle here that’s also interesting that this design decision sort of prospectively addressed. This would be the issue of what’s called “Model Autophagy Disorder” or MAD for short. Basically this is what happens when AI summaries themselves get recursively summarized, like a snake continuing to eat its own tail. When this happens the quality and accuracy of the information degrades with each recursive loop. With my decision to make parts of summaries only forwardable by DM and NOT easily reinserted back into a channel this would keep the “well water clean” so to speak so that the input information stays as pure as possible.

Dual-User UX: Designing for Humans and Machine Agents

Before we wrap up, there was one thing I was not really thinking about in 2023 that was only just barely on the horizon back then. That would be AI agents, which became a huge talking point in 2025 and 2026. If I were to tackle this project today, that would be the biggest thing I’d also take into account. I’d want to think about not only the user experience for the people who would be generating and using these AI channel summaries, but also how would agentic AI systems navigating channel info and summary info play into the mix. How could I balance the tradeoffs necessary to satisfy the needs and requirements of both humans and AI agents?

Thanks for reading: hit me up!

I hope you enjoyed reading my case study retrospective! Hopefully you were able to get something out of it. You can see the original 2023 case study on my website here. https://www.bradlutjens.com/slack-case-study Drop me a line if you have any questions or want to discuss further!

Citations

• Nielsen, J. (2023). AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-paradigm/
• Liu, N. F., Lin, K., Hewitt, J., Paranjape, A., Bevilacqua, M., Petroni, F., & Liang, P. (2023). Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts. Stanford University, UC Berkeley, & UCSD.
• McKinsey & Company. (2025). Superagency in the Workplace: The Shift from Generative AI to Task-Based AI. McKinsey Global Institute.
• Microsoft & Harvard Business Review. (2025). The Digital Debt Paradox: Why AI Output is Outpacing Human Input. HBR Analytics Services.
• Shumailov, I., et al. (2024). AI Models That Consume Their Own Output Deform and Decay. Nature.

Why My 2023 Slack AI Channel Summary Feature Survived the 2026 “Workslop” Crisis was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Problem-Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People — Ken Watanabe

Brief Summary: This book was written as a simple introduction to problem-solving for Japanese schoolchildren but became a hit in the business world. It’s a great, simple primer on how to approach what can be an enormously complicated, broad, and complex topic. Problem-solving is broken down into four easy-to-understand steps.

• 1. Understand the current situation.
• 2. Identify the root cause of the problem.
• 3. Develop an effective action plan.
• 4. Execute until the problem is solved, making modifications as necessary.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• 1. Overthinking is a killer when it comes to problem-solving. When you take action on a problem, every result or piece of feedback you get is another opportunity to reflect, learn valuable lessons, and course correct. Minor improvements over time make a massive difference in outcomes over the long term.
• 2. Big, complex problems can be approached by first identifying root causes and then breaking them down into smaller, manageable problems. A logic tree map is a useful visual tool for breaking down problems into their constituent parts and exploring other questions and hypotheses stemming from the issue at hand.
• 3. Collecting and analyzing data should never be done without first clarifying the question you are trying to answer. A solid plan should be developed first to avoid being buried in an avalanche of information. First, define the issues you are trying to solve. Next, state your current hypotheses and rationale. Last, list the analyses, actions, and information required to prove or disprove those hypotheses.

Quote: “When you do take action, every result is an opportunity to reflect and learn valuable lessons. Even if what you take away from your assessment seems to be of small consequence, all of these small improvements taken together make a huge difference in the long term.”

2. The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI — Paul Leonardi & Tsedal Neely

Brief Summary: The Digital Mindset is a book about how in a data and algorithm-driven world, we all need new ways of thinking, seeing, interacting, and acting to be effective communicators and doers in a rapidly changing world and always-evolving business and social environment. The authors focus on three different approaches.

• 1. Collaboration: Increasingly, we will have to learn not only to be able to work with lots of different people in different roles, in different locations to tackle complex challenges, but we will also have to learn how to work with and use artificial intelligence effectively to augment our human capacities. Working with AI and working with humans will be two different skillets that require different mindsets.
• 2. Computation: Data and Analytics can be great tools for understanding and leveraging solutions, but they also can be challenging to understand if you aren’t a data scientist or statistician. Interpreting data wisely means learning how to separate signal from noise and identify what pieces of data matter in context to the problem you are trying to solve.
• 3. Change: Digital systems constantly evolve in ways that often cannot be controlled entirely. Any modern digital system is a stack of all different technologies, pieces of software, and services all knitted together for a common purpose and to solve a particular set of problems. Because of this, data security is never foolproof. Part of what it means to have a digital mindset is accepting this fact and learning how to mitigate risk with regard to potential security flaws in the system at large.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• One helpful concept presented was the 30% rule when it comes to understanding complex technology. If you can get your head around 30% of the essential concepts in any given technical niche (like AI or blockchain, for example), that will serve as a good base from a business communication perspective to be able to converse effectively with people in the field who have much deeper technical knowledge than you do.
• Adaptivity and curiosity are common threads that link all the skills mentioned throughout the book. Building digital systems is a complex process that would take many lifetimes to master, and even then, things are constantly changing as new technologies are developed and integrated. Being able to adapt, constantly learn and leverage the knowledge of others is of the utmost importance.
• A commitment to constantly running experiments and testing hypotheses is a core tenet of a digital mindset. One way you can help ensure that you are interpreting data correctly is by running well-crafted but low-stakes tests first. This is an actionable use of data that gives immediate feedback and real-world results.

Quote: “Digital transformation is not a one-and-done; it’s a state of perpetual transition; your task is not simply to adapt, but to be adaptive.”

3. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man — Marshall McLuhan

Brief Summary: This one is a bit more of a heady and academic read and has some dated language since it was written in 1964. In McLuhan’s terms, media is any technology or tool that extends our capabilities as humans. His central hypothesis can be boiled down to the idea that the tools we use to interact with the world have a profound, almost invisible power to shape how we think, interact with each other, and live our lives day to day.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• McLuhan’s phrase, “The medium is the message,” was iconic. It means that with any information being conveyed, the content can’t be divorced from the method of delivery it’s being communicated with. For example, with a TV news broadcast, the medium of a half-hour cable news show shapes and, in some ways, dictates the content of what is communicated. This applies to everything, and the internet conveys information by its own set of rules. The content and the delivery method can’t be seen as separate entities.
• Reading a book written in the 60s that so accurately prophesied the beginning of the 21st century and the rise of the internet is fascinating. One of his most astute observations was that what he termed “electric technology,” or what would become the internet in recent decades, is a tool to extend our central nervous systems into the world. In his words…. “the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”
• Again, to paraphrase McLuhan, mechanical technology (cars, roads, supply chains) explodes, while electric technology (the internet) implodes. This is more of an observation on my part, but I think a lot of the perceived fragmentation that we see in the culture at large over the last decade-plus is what would inevitably happen when you take highly individualized people formed by the legacy of the mechanical age and link everyone’s brains together via Twitter and Facebook. Suddenly, we all can see what everyone else is thinking.

Quote: “The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.”

4. Think Like A Freak — Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt

Brief Summary: Think Like a Freak takes the ideas of popular author and podcaster economists Steven Dubner and Steven D. Levitt and distills them into an easily digestible framework and set of lenses for looking at the world. It expands on work from their hit books Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics and takes a similar short story-based case study approach. Their big ideas can be outlined as follows;

• 1. Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
• 2. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it can make a complicated world less so.
• 3. The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
• 4. Correlation does not equal causality.
• 5. Smart people often are the most prone to confirmation bias.
• 6. People are often too busy to rethink what they think.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• One of the best mindsets you can take to approach problem-solving is shelving your moral compass. When you are already biased to the obvious “rightness” or the “wrongness” of a given problem or issue, it’s much, much more challenging to see root causes for what they actually are because you are starting with an assumption that’s nearly invisible to your awareness.
• Thinking Like a child is another excellent mindset for problem-solving. Small children aren’t afraid to ask dumb questions and look stupid in front of their peers. They are also relentlessly curious. If you’ve ever heard a kid string together a chain of why questions until they get to the bottom of something, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
• When trying to crack a particularly difficult problem, sometimes it requires taking a step back and redefining the problem you are trying to solve to put yourself on the path to different solutions. Tunnel vision is a very easy trap to fall into.

Quote: “If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.”

5. How to Take Smart Notes — Sonke Ahrens

Brief Summary: This book is based on a man named Niklas Luhman’s note-taking technique called Zettelkasten. Luhman came up with the idea in the 50s, so this book takes the overall gist of the method and adapts it to use with modern software. The main idea, however, is simple. Instead of organizing notes by topic and subtopics where info gets stored but often forgotten, they are organized into only three categories where information can mingle with other ideas in the same physical and mental space. The point is to ensure that notes turn into actionable output without being forgotten.

• 1. Fleeting Notes are quick information reminders and are disposable within a day or two.
• 2. Permanent Notes will never be thrown away, and take the quick info gathered from the fleeting notes and summarize it in a more permanently understandable way.
• 3. Project Notes pertain to a specific, actionable project being worked on and pull info from permanent notes. After the project is over, these notes can be archived.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• When researching something and taking notes, that information is only useful if it will be helpful and actionable in the future. This system does an excellent job in helping to tame the chaos of lots of different insights and sources of input, so you can creatively build connections between ideas as a project grows.
• Avoid reading things passively because we forget much of what we read. Highlighting or underlining when reading is the first step in retaining information that can be used or combined with other ideas down the road.
• Organizing notes by project has two main advantages; it ensures information saved is highly actionable. Secondly, it ensures that vastly different types of media, inputs, quotes, data, ideas, etc., can all be in the same mental space where they can be combined into new insights.

Quote: “On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this puzzle is that creative people need both. The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”

6. Business Made Simple: 60 Days to Master Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Execution, Management, Personal Productivity and More — Donald Miller

Brief Summary: Business Made Simple is a crash course in everything you need to know about how modern businesses work and how to fashion yourself into a high-value employee, leader, entrepreneur, or business owner. There are nine primary areas of focus for growth; character, leadership, personal productivity, messaging, marketing, business strategy, execution, sales, and management.

My 3 Main Takeaways:

• 1. A business can be thought of as an airplane. You need four main components for it to run smoothly. A business exists primarily to solve a problem or set of problems for customers.
• Plane Body: Overhead — It takes resources and people to solve problems effectively. Those resources might include salaries, medical benefits, rent, office supplies, etc.
• The Wings: Products and Services — Wings give the entire plane lift. Without revenue from selling these products and services (the air in this metaphor), the plane can’t take off.
• The Engines: Sales and Marketing — These two work in tandem and move the entire operation forward. Marketing is generally cheaper than sales, but both allow the business to grow and scale.
• Fuel: Capital and Cash Flow — Money is what fuels the business. It goes without saying that having the money on hand to grow a business is the most critical factor in success.
• 2. Being able to tell a great story is one of the best business skills you can develop for success. Why? Great storytelling gets people to buy into ideas emotionally. With so much competing for our daily attention, being able to tell a compelling story that will cut through the noise will not only help you sell to your customers but will help align people in an organization as well.
• 3. One key to personal productivity is blocking out your time daily. This means scheduling time to do deep work towards meaningful goals in advance so that requests on your time from clients or co-workers don’t erode your ability to focus. Scheduling no more than three essential tasks per day prevents spreading limited personal attention too thin.

Quote: “What’s the most important thing you can do today? If you can answer that question, morning after morning, you are in an elite group of professionals.”

An in-depth look at 6 off-the-radar books to help you think like a better UX designer. was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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/

Book Link: Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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.

How I supercharged my productivity: My journey into UX and getting myself organized was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.