10 UXDERS, 10 QUESTIONS, 10 WEEKS

Week 6, Productivity tools: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

Add these team-approved online and offline tools to your productivity toolkit.

PatternFly Team

Published in

PatternFly

11 min readNov 10, 2021

The title card for this week’s question, “What online and offline tools do you use to be more productive?” featuring headshots of all 10 contributors.

Wouldn’t we all like more hours in the day? Sometimes it can be a challenge to mark off all items on our to-do list during the work day, and then we need to pull a second shift at home: washing the dishes, feeding the dog, doing laundry, and more.

While we can’t extend the 24-hour day, we can at least use some tools to help us get more done and stay organized. At Red Hat, our UXD team members are no strangers to full work weeks and busy schedules, so let’s hear what they have to say about using online and offline productivity tools to keep their personal and professional lives running smoothly.

What online and offline tools do you use to be more productive?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

One thing I use both in work and my regular personal life is an app Todoist. It’s a to-do list where you can set up recurring things and categorize them. That app really helps me check items off, and feeds into my whole morning routine, the little chunks of time I section out throughout the day. It’s a physical thing I do, and I get a little rush of happiness when I can check something off. I found that I like to check boxes in my life, so I have a written to-do list, too. I use a lot of notebooks: I’m kind of old school because I use pen and paper. I like writing, so I take a lot of notes on paper.

I use Google Calendar to block time even outside of work hours; I store reminders in there. I find myself forgetting small things. Last night I forgot to run the dishwasher, luckily that wasn’t something that was catastrophic. It’s a little thing that slipped my mind. That’s not something I have in my reminders, but having things I can check off keeps keeps me focused. The reminders feed into that dopamine rush. I don’t know what that says about me as a person…

Beau: Principal UX Designer

I write things on paper. It’s more real to have in that analog format. Even if I never use it again, it works for me. Another thing I’ve been doing this past year is taking advantage of the Google Suite. There are some great features: If you record a meeting, it’s in the invite. If you do a notes document, it can be a running document that the whole team can share. You can use labeling to keep everything organized. I am slowly learning those tools. It’s great talking to other people on the team about what works for them.

Jira has helped me as I lead a UX team. We have a Jira board for our team, which we then link to the business and engineering teams’ boards, so all our stories paint the whole picture. A lot of stuff I work on is implemented a month after we are working on the design. Jira allows us to put all our designs into one place. Since their board links to our board, they can see the work, and we try to keep the status updated so they can see what’s in progress. It’s not a perfect tool, but it allows the engineers to see what designers they’re working with and see early design work for more context.

I’ve also started using Trello, which allows me to put my paper to-do list into a cloud-based, digital format. I can call it up wherever, so I don’t have to worry about losing my actual paper. I also use a text editor; I just type in it. If you just want a notepad at your fingertips anywhere, text editor it is.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

For offline tools, I take notes on paper. I can’t say they’re always the most helpful thing — I can’t always read my own handwriting. But it does reinforce in my mind that there was something to do. I even have a paper calendar here that I mark up.

You can’t force creativity, you have to kind of feel it. And if you’re not feeling it, sitting there in front of your screen isn’t going to make it show up. Sometimes that means using other tools like going for a walk, eating a sandwich, or getting inspiration from your favorite magazine or something.

I’m a huge fan of Google Calendar; I set reminders. Within Google Calendar itself, for example, someone’s work anniversary is coming up. I mark the day on my calendar with a reminder, because I want to make sure to recognize them. I’m a big fan of that. I’m probably less of a fan of Google Docs. That medium feels very disposable. It ends up being a throwaway thing. In general, I don’t like taking notes online. I feel like typing doesn’t reiterate anything for me. When I type, I can type so fast that I can just copy the words I’m hearing. I think less about what the other person is saying. Whereas if I’m writing notes by hand, I have to think about what’s being said and condense it in a way that makes sense.

Sometimes I sketch wireframes out by hand, totally offline. I enjoy brainstorming in person. There’s certainly something to whiteboarding offline, too. But I don’t mind having conversations over the phone, video, or email either.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

This may be unoriginal, but I use Google searches for ideas sometimes. In terms of online tooling, being able to search well is really important. I use standard tools like the Google Suite and the Apple notes app to keep notes related to one-on-one meetings and so on. I always have that open.

In general, Slack helps me be more productive at times. Especially when there’s a group I can post a question or a comment to, to save time and be more efficient.

Offline, I would default to pencil and paper, I guess. Having the time to think a bit and give myself a bit of time to come up with ideas is important. Being offline to have time to reflect is key.

Even working at home, there’s times where I’ll want to talk to individuals and brainstorm with people. If there’s an opportunity to throw an idea at somebody and talk for 10 minutes, I find that really helpful, whether it’s in the office or working at home. I guess I would consider that a mixture of offline and online, depending on your setting.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

I keep a written to-do list in my notebook and I cross things off the list. I find that that’s my best productivity tool. I’ve tried dozens of things, applications on the computer, online, but, every time I’ve tried to use them, I always go back to using pen and paper because it’s easier and more direct. To me, it’s my primary productivity tool.

The other thing I started doing a couple of years ago, is block out some time on your calendar to plan, reflect, and prioritize. I learned this tip from a Red Hat training on how to be more productive. Every Monday morning, I block out an hour to sit down and think about where things wound up last week and what I need to accomplish this week, then write those thoughts down in my notebook. Then at the end of each day, I check back with that list.

Every day, I block an event for 4:45PM to wind down and take about five minutes to go over what I did today, and what my next day will look like. What meetings do I have? What are my priorities? It’s a very helpful habit, I would say, even to just be able to stop, think, and reflect on everything.

Sometimes I feel so interruption-driven, so it’s important to take a few minutes to reflect and not always just react to everything going on around you. Usually when someone pings me on Slack, I’ll try to get back to them quickly. Even if it’s something I can’t address right away, I’ll at least let them know I’ll take a look later. I feel like this is just a common courtesy that sometimes gets lost when people become so busy.

Joe: Principal UX Developer

It’s a very fancy app called Notes. Nothing crazy. I saw a coworker give a talk about their personal operating system and the ecosystem of tools that they use. Everything was really organized, and I thought to myself, “Oh, someday I’ll do that too. That sounds helpful.” I still haven’t changed.

For reminders, I use Google Calendar, and I still have a physical notebook on my desk that I use to write notes to myself daily. My phone is a big help when I’m away from my desk, but at my desk it gets me distracted, so it faces down on the end of my desk, so I don’t pay attention to it.

Otherwise, the usual office suspects: slack, gmail, gdocs, and the office coffee pot.

Shiri: Senior User Experience Designer

For prototyping, we all use the same tools like Sketch. For keeping my notes and to-do list, I go old school and use sticky notes. Completely offline. I have my notebook to write myself some notes. And the day after, I open the same page and mark the things I have to do or change. For more technical tools, I use Notes. It’s a great tool.

I think online tools for me, it’s just Google Docs, Google Calendar, and everything related to Google. There’s no specific tool that I started working with, which is kind of different from others.

Marie: Interaction Designer

For daily tasks, I usually stick sticky notes on my desk or on the border of my screen when I have to prioritize more things that week. To track priorities, I use the basic reminder app on my Mac. I was thinking about joining Clockwise, but I don’t think I’m ready for it. I don’t like when something else or someone else is trying to organize my stuff.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

One is called Tasksboard, and it uses Google tasks. In Gmail you can only view your task lists one at a time but Taskboard shows them all side by side. In my old role, the team was split into work streams to allow the developers to focus on one thing at a time. As the only UX designer, I worked across all the streams. I became a huge bottleneck to all of the developers trying to work in parallel. Taskboard helped to show my eight-or-so task lists side by side.

A second tool, Toby, is for collapsing and grouping tabs. I know that’s native in Google Chrome now, but I still like using Toby to easily close all the tabs I open during meetings. I have a million tabs open most of the time so it’s nice to be able to group them by topic and hide them until I have time to get to them.

An offline tool that I have is a whiteboard desk. The whole top of it is a whiteboard, so I can scribble random notes on it, then just wipe them off instead of wasting paper. It was one of my pandemic splurges because it was one of the biggest things I missed when I started working from home.

As far as my home office goes, I’m in the hallway. My partner has an office, and if he needs coffee, he’s going to walk behind me. It’s been a challenge because I can’t shut a door for quiet time. We set up a Hue light and can each press a button to turn it on. When it’s pink, I’m in a meeting. When it’s blue, he’s in a meeting. I do like my space though because I have lots of windows.

Margot: Interaction Designer

Honestly, I don’t really use any online tools other than Google tools and the Notes app. My biggest thing is I keep a spreadsheet on Google Sheets of the tasks I need to do each week, and the status of when I finish something. I also do a Post-It a day, to write down two or three things I want to get done today. It helps me keep track of things and remind me of smaller things that I may not add to the larger spreadsheet.

I’m a huge Post-It person. Sometimes I’ll go through old ones and see what I forgot about. Also, if there’s something I want to remind myself to do in the future, I’ll create a task on my Google Calendar to remind me about it.