A design sprint to get my ship together
Depression isn’t new, but working in product is
This is the most personal account I was ever willing to put out. It’s about being in a dark place and dragging myself out of it. I‘m publishing it in the hopes it can help others in any way. It gets lonely out there.
A dark place
In December 2016, I was struggling with anxiety attacks and a pervasive, suffocating feeling of self-loathing. It became so bad that I had to take a couple of days off to put myself back together.
None of this was new to me, and I knew it would get better eventually. But as I was heading home for my self-imposed long weekend, it struck me that, having recently turned 24, I’d been struggling with depression for most of the past 10 years.
More self-loathing ensued.
10 years of destructive thoughts. 10 years of countless wasted hours in bed, of crying for no reason, of feeling rejected and inadequate. 10 years of feeling better, and thinking it wouldn’t happen again, just to relapse right after.
I was also quite aware that these were also 10 years of keeping my promise of leaving my hometown and moving abroad and seeing the world. 10 years of working on meaningful projects and falling in love with wonderful people and learning past my mistakes.
Yet I still couldn’t shake my depression out.
Instead, I did what any responsible adult would do: I became an expert in hiding my feelings and not confronting my inner demons. Every single time, I hid my lows and refused to believe my highs would ever pass. Call me stupid for doing this, but I’ve seen enough panicked looks at the slightest hint of deviation from mental normalcy to keep me from dropping the mask.
But December meant yearly recaps and reminiscences over how shitty 2016 was for everyone. This brings me back to that self-loathing period. Despite everything, I always end every year thinking that, all in all, it had been a good year, that I was happy and evolved as a person.
Not that year.
Even discounting the fact that every year I raise my standards towards myself, I ended 2016 feeling that I became a worse person, who accomplished very little.
This hurt.
But, somehow, the few things I‘d learned in 2016 kicked in. It was the year I started calling myself a designer after all. So I asked questions — Why and how did I let all this happen? What were the points where I was falling short? How could I get back on track?
More than anything else, I needed a plan, and I decided to approach it as I would do in any other UX project.
A heuristic analysis
First I asked, “What is making me feel bad?”, and poured everything into paper. It took some time to unveil all threads, but after a few hours, I had a much clearer picture of the aspects I needed to fix and how they interacted with each other.
This step alone made me feel a lot calmer and more confident. Confronting and externalising my ugly thoughts made them seem way less daunting than when they’re churning in my mind. I wasn’t seeking solutions. Understand your problem well first, look for solutions later.
Mapping all my worries made me understand that, in fact, none of them is that big of a deal. I felt tempted to jump into the (so obvious) solutions, but I forced myself to stay on track on the exercise. Sure, it would be fairly easy to start exercising again and spending less time online, as I‘d done many times in the past. But without a sturdier method, I’d still be a bad day away from derailing myself again.
So I took all those issues one by one, and broke them down into three categories:
- Fixable. Everything that has a fairly easy solution. Having an unhealthy lifestyle, not learning enough, or not showing my appreciation to people, are all addressable issues.
- Not fixable. The world being a horrible place or the gripping fear of losing my family or friends, these are things that don’t have any solution, at least not directly under my control.
- Destructive thought. Telling myself that I’m a waste of space is definitely not an issue. It’s not real. This goes for anything that I wouldn’t ever say to anyone, but keep repeating to myself like a mantra. We are not our destructive thoughts.
This categorisation gave me the clarity to know what I should focus on (the fixable issues) and what there was no point dwelling on (the not fixable issues and the destructive thoughts).
A feature list to get my shit together
This exercise was getting more exciting. My focus started to shift from the problems to the features I could work on to address them.
I rewrote the same list, weeding out the not fixable things and the destructive thoughts — I don’t know what else do in that front apart from being aware of them. In front of each problem, I listed all possible solutions.
Being this exhaustive killed my self-pity. Most solutions were ridiculously obvious. Some were trickier. A few I’m still thinking about. Either way, I wasn’t helpless.
I just needed to roll these solutions out, and ensure they’d keep rolling.
A framework for keeping aforementioned shit together
At this point, I had a very clear understanding of what was going on in my head and how to regain control. But then again, who doesn’t, at least in part? At least in theory? I’d implemented many of these things before, to varying degrees of success. So how could I guarantee that this time I wasn’t going to get derailed?
I needed product management to get myself shipped.
This meant shifting my focus from the features I’d loooove to implement immediately, and looking at the bigger picture. What do I want in life? At least for the following year? What were my success metrics? How should I track my evolution?
This is the shakiest part of this exercise—I’m still learning how to plan for the long term. I noted down my first principles and appended modest yearly goals to them.
For instance, for the “Learn more” principle, my goals for 2017 are to travel to at least one new country (not counting with India, Portugal, or any other country I have lived/visited before), to read at least 12 books, and to write at least once a week.
These longer-term goals aren’t set in stone yet. But they covered the basics well enough to move on to my PRD.
Which, in this case, took the form of a journal.
Why a journal? Because I needed a single artefact I could customise at will, that forced me to set goals and to follow them through.
Now, I’d been keeping journals since I was 13, but over time these became pretty much just an assortment of paper where my thoughts went to die. As of December 2016, my journal was a rabbit hole of scattered to-do’s, wireframes, meeting notes, and personal writing.
At least I was keeping one. I had also gone through several tracking and productivity apps over the years, not a single one worked for me.
Journal it was, then, but I needed to do it right. I started reading around, and I discovered that this was actually a thing! I learned about Bullet Journalling, the journaling framework created by Ryder Carroll. I read posts from people who had found the same solution to work for them. I drooled over images of journals elevated to a work of art. There was this great community out there of people keeping themselves organised while sharing their mutual love for stationery.
Post-shipping
Damn this was exciting. I came up with a journaling structure, with an index page, and yearly, monthly, and weekly overviews, and some themed lists such as “Books to read” and the like. I was so going to nail this thing now.
But shipping a product is not the end of the story. Andre Albuquerque puts it better than me:
All product builders love the word “ship”, but forget that, once a ship leaves the harbour, it still needs to get to the destination. Intact. Don’t ship feature and forget about them: iterate, evolve them, prove them (right or wrong). Don’t deliver Titanics and don’t become a Feature Factory.
This wasn’t any different. In theory, I knew this would be a work in progress and that I would adapt as I went. What I didn’t know was that in just a few weeks down the line, all this enthusiasm would wane.
The problem was that I had been trying to fit in a particular structure instead of the other way around. I was pressuring myself to make everything all pretty and perfect. I was terrified of silly things like making mistakes or getting the cover dirty. So eventually I started putting the journal aside.
For a few weeks, I kept taking my journal with me, just to feel pangs of guilt as I saw it laying there, barely used. My inner voice started screeching, “This is ruuuuuuined this is ugly and incomplete you’ll never do anything right”.
This is where having a physical artefact really helped. This is the point where I would have deleted yet another app and sank back to the bare minimum routine.
But that stupid journal was still there. I could see it.
So by the end of January 2017, I opened the journal again, and wrote, very imperfectly:
Why I failed in January:
- Overly complicated tracking method
- Afraid of making things not pretty
Fuck pretty
I dropped all the fluff. I kept the structure to the bare minimum. I started teaching myself it was ok to make mistakes, it was ok to make things less than perfect. No one was going to see it.
Every week, I reserve two pages to set my priorities by day. In between those, goes everything else. There was no initial pressure to follow any structure, but over time I started noting down anything from writing prompts, actual writing, quotes of Medium posts and books and podcasts, all types of lists, theater stubs, airplane tickets. The pages are numbered, and I can refer to the index to find anything specific.
I haven’t stopped since then.
Ultimately, it’s helping to solve the problems I had set to solve almost five months ago by nudging me to stay on track. It became natural to use it to set out my priorities every morning, to write my weekly reflections every Sunday, to reach out to it to note down every quote, every idea, every single detail that sparks my interest.
It also had the unexpected benefit to spark my creativity as nothing had before. Work, creative writing, plays, trips, reflections, quotes from conversations and blog posts in dabbling calligraphy, everything is gloriously coming together in a single, fairly organised place, mingling and brewing to the point that sometimes it feels like an intellectual high as I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Is this the happy ending? Did the journal cure my depression?
Of course not. The highs and lows are still there. My mind is still a pretty bleak place to be.
The journal isn’t the final product, I am. It constantly reminds me to confront my worries and to stick to the plan. If nothing else, it’s a neat way to keep me organised and to keep my creativity flowing.
