Throughout my UX/UI course, I’ve been putting together a toolkit of exercises, organizational approaches, and design thinking methods that will inevitably help me solve the issues that arise on the job. But I recently realized that the tools I’m learning for the workplace can easily be used in my personal life as well!
Periodically I’ll get into a rut where I feel completely overwhelmed and want to detach myself from everyone and everything so that I can piece together the mystery behind me emotions. This always ends up being a painstakingly slow process (think unraveling those pair of head phones you’ve long neglected at the bottom of your bag), mainly because there’s never one particular source of frustration, but rather a series of sometimes drastically unrelated things working in tandem to drive me to a breaking point.
This happened to be the case just last week while I was finishing up some lesson reading. My stress level had gotten to a point of intrusion that I couldn’t focus on the screen in front of me. So out of the blue I decided to sketch out the first problem I could think of, starting with the source and drawing arrows to each pain point stemming from it. A couple minutes later I was about 60% less stressed, equipped with a full fledged map of all the things that needed addressing, along with core complaints I could name individually and identify their relationships.
Now the mind map I created wasn’t the magic wand that would wave my problems away, but I was fine with that because it wasn’t meant to be. Just like in UX/UI Design, mind maps are often times used as a starting point to visualize the fuller picture and aide in deciding which areas could benefit from a little attention. Our brains are quite some amazing cells clusters, but sometimes they could use the help of a simple map!
