Things I wish I knew as a young Visual Designer
When I started my career as a graphic designer I had no idea how to plan my tasks, and how to be more efficient in executing them. Stakeholders often came to me with requests all the time. As I was fresh in the industry, I felt an unsaid need to prove myself as a good designer and kept saying “yes” to everything that came my way, regardless of the timing. Little did I know I was pushing myself down a lane of overwhelm and anxiety from work.
Since then, it's been 9 years of working with some amazing mature organisations and I’m happy to report that work has stopped feeling as overwhelming as it did when I had started. Here are some of the things I learnt which can help you in the early days of your career.
Preparing for better planning
You must’ve heard this many times before, “Always do your homework”. Well, this is true even in planning.
- Have a deadline defined for various kinds of projects that you take up generally.
- Make sure you have a list of projects ready
- Thoroughly go through the list to understand if they are groomed and ready to pick before you start. If they aren’t, follow up with the stakeholders.
- Break everything down into smaller chunks
Planning for your bandwidth
Now that you know how valuable your time is, let’s start planning to get the maximum out of it.
- Plan your time first. Are you available for the entire sprint? Any upcoming events at work like hiring drives, planning meetings or holidays? Never include leaves.
- Always account for feedback/changes while allocating deadlines.
- Things can take longer than expected when you actually start on the work. Sometimes, stakeholders are busy, sometimes the ideas don’t flow and sometimes you may have to do a lot more than expected after feedback. Plan only for 80% of the sprint’s overall time. Buffer it up! Keep an extra day for all the adhocs that may come your way.
- Pick only as many items you know you can deliver by the end of the sprint.
- If the projects require more than a sprint’s time to complete, divide them into subtasks.
- Split up your days as per the deadlines you created earlier.
Prioritizing for a better outcome
While planning will help you be more efficient, prioritization will help you focus on projects which need your undivided attention. A quote you must’ve heard a lot is, “Choose your battles wisely”.Usually, the laundry list is always huge. It’s practically impossible to give each project your 100%. Try and understand where do you need to go the extra mile and where its not.
- While prioritizing any project make sure you ask all relevant questions such as: Who is the consumer of the content? Why is it necessary to launch the campaign now? What impact will it create? How much of my time and effort will go into execution and delivery?
- Prioritize projects with high impact. Dividing your days to make sure high-impact projects are getting more weightage. This gives you enough time to ideate, conceptualize, and space to get more creative.
In the end, I would like to remind you to be gentle with yourself and prepare for the long run. Now that the planning bit is done, you’ve won half the battle! In the next blog (will link here soon), I’ll be covering execution, delivery and analysing impact.
Hope this will help you plan your sprints better and will give you enough time for creative thinking!
