04 | Managing a one person design project
How to lead yourself on a design project and not go insane
18th December 2017
Closing the doctor door left me in shock. Finally, I knew what is happening to me but the diagnose scared shit out of me. The doctor suggested that I should focus on my health right now and definitely avoid stress and overwork. That is interesting, in three weeks, I am starting my thesis — a project that even the sanest change into robots…
At that time I had two options — or I will come back to Sweden and finish my studies or I will have to take a year off, take care of my health and come back to Sweden a year after. For sure I understand that I will not be able to commit so much as people around me and spent as many hours working as I would like to.
Generally speaking a final project at my school is ‘a big deal’ — usually stressful and pretty demanding. The thesis project is done individually for 5 months, during which with the support from tutors, a student has to pass 4 milestones to graduate and show the project at the main stage during exhibition event. To go through all of those checkpoints alone I had to figure out my own way of working that will not worsen my condition and as a result, I would have to postpone finishing it. I realized that the only way to make my project on time is to work smarter than before.
By that, I mean that I need to have a perfect time management and avoid stuck moments. I started to learn more about time/team management and established a couple of rules that guided my project. They saved me back then and I think that was the smoothest project that I did at my studies.
Understanding your role
You are in charge
Usually, the final project of the studies is the one where you work alone and do everything by yourself. You are a team leader, manager, researcher and designer combined in one person. It is important to remember that. In the beginning, it can seem scary but thanks to wearing different hats you will be able to develop skills in different areas too. Working alone will also affect your performance — especially during the research phase I was feeling that I am super slow. It was because I am usually working in a team, so the work can be divided between a team and speed up the whole process. When you are alone, you can only work at the speed of one person which will differ from day to day. You are the whole team so your bad mood or lack of motivation will affect the performance of your one person team that day.
Pulled to different directions
During a project, we are quite often pulled to different directions by different people. You will have a chance to meet many tutors, advisors that will try to help you by giving you advice. As usual, you will not be able to satisfy everyone. I think changing the mindset is really crucial here. Always try to keep in mind that you are in charge of every action and decision that you take and are responsible for its consequences. Bits of advice is great but be smart about filtering them or tweaking them in a way that you are sure that will be helpful for the project. In the end, you will have to defend it by yourself.
Scheduling: Reverse steps
Before the project started I received an overview of the schedule with milestone presentations. First look at this was pretty discouraging but at the same time, I was surprised by how much time I have for all of the activities.
I spend a couple of hours since the schedule of a project was really important to my goal of working smarter. I used the reverse planning method as it seemed the most natural in that case. I looked at the first presentation date and decide on how many days I need to prepare a presentation deck. Then I decided on what should be the step before building the deck — in my case, it was a research synthesis. But what I need to perform before the research synthesis… and so on.
Suddenly the time between each milestone didn’t look so exciting. I actually get scared how little time I have to do some of the actions. Of course, after I build the initial plan I modified it for some activities, leaving more time for tasks that I consider more time consuming and shortening the one that I feel the most comfortable with.
Detailed schedule vs overview schedule
I heard mixed opinions on building a detailed schedule for a thesis project. In some opinions, it is impossible to follow your ideal plan and there will be a lot of time wasting on rescheduling. I decided to build a detailed schedule and never regret it. It was really helpful to judge if I was on schedule or behind it. If I noticed I was behind, I tried to speed up by removing unnecessary things. Seeing that everything goes with a schedule was really comforting and removing a lot of pressure.
But I think the most important things about planning is… sticking to it. If you don’t follow what you decided on initially, even the best plan will not help to meet deadlines.
Macro planning: One week overview
Let’s talk a little how to approach a week during the project. Every Monday I started with reviewing tasks for this week. What I will do each day of this week and deciding if I haven’t missed anything. Monday overview was helpful to put me on track and a warm up after a weekend break.
The whole heavy scheduling work was done on Friday. It was usually a 45-minute activity. I hold a meeting where a project leader (me) and other team members (me, me and me too) were deciding on the next week activities.
It started with checking if all of the planned things were delivered. If I had overdue tasks I did a filtering: if this is a crucial thing I moved it to the next week or if it was not something really important, I removed it from a schedule and forget about it.
The next step was looking at the initial project plan and ensuring myself that everything is going according to it. Having a detailed project plan build before the project started, helped me to understand what should be the deliverables at the end of the next week. This helped to build the main tasks for the next week. In the reverse planning manner, I brainstorm what should be activities that will lead to my weekly deliverables. After having tasks written down, I roughly put them in my to-do app by assigning them to specific days. Those tasks were a base of my everyday to-do list.
Those Monday and Friday planning activities were on a repeat in my calendar. Establishing specific hours for those events helped to stick to them and to not postpone them. In some cases, I was postponing some of Friday’s tasks just to find time to plan the next week. Sounds counterintuitive but worked out pretty well.
The structure and overview of the tasks were giving me confidence that I am on track. The clear goals removed chaos and temptation of going into not productive directions. Of course, you can say that I was wasting a lot of time on planning and not actually working but in my opinion, it saved me a lot of time during the week and removed a lot of pressure and last minute panic.
Micro planning: One day
Morning
Each day also had two scheduled activities on every day repeat, each taking like 15 minutes. One was in the morning and was focused on reviewing tasks for a day. Some of the tasks were added on Friday when I was building a rough week schedule and some of them were added during the week because I didn’t realize that I need to do something or they were drops from a previous day.
A crucial thing of the morning overview was that all of the tasks were already on the table — I was not wasting time deciding what I had to do, everything was there! The whole concept of planning was to decide on tasks a day before when I was tired of ‘doing design’ but I was still in the flow of understanding what should be done next. That way, I wasn’t wasting time on thinking what should be done the next day. If there would be one thing that I would like to remember from this text is this:
Always finish a day with a list of tasks for the next day.
It will save you a lot of time every day.
At the end of everyday morning plan was prioritization. To give a little structure to a day I gave each task a priority and figure out the order of performing it. I usually started with some small things just to warm up and hit the most important task before lunch. Making an order of tasks helped to make a day smoother without thinking about the next step. I crossed out a finished task and was able to move to the next one.
Before going home
I was finishing a day with another 15 minutes activity. I looked at the tasks that I didn’t finish that day and decided what should be done with them. Some of them were moved to the next day and some of them were trashed if I decided that actually they are not needed. I also added tasks that came up during that day — the urgent one landed on next day list and others were passed on days after.
This detailed list of a day was bringing a lot of peacefulness. Those short scheduling activities were crucial to let me focus on doing design job instead of always having in my thoughts around the next steps. While project continued I also learned a little more about how much time each task take me and was able to not overschedule my day.
Enough is enough
One of the things I realized is that some of the activities can be continued forever. How you can tell yourself that you are 100% sure that you learn everything about your design topic from a research. It is impossible! A research has this property that can be endlessly iterated on. With every day of continuing is getting harder and harder to learn something new.
Quite often, we think that if we stopped the research at this moment we will lose a chance of finding an insight that will completely change the project. Usually is not like it. It is hard to say to yourself that the research is done but you have a finite time for a project and you have to stick to a schedule. A really important skill for every designer is the ability to understand the moment when research outcome is strong enough to enable working on the next design process steps.
Also, look at research from a different perspective. You will probably have a limited time to present its outcome. If you gather too much information, you will not be able to show all of it and it can actually be really discouring.
It is a marathon, not a sprint
I will like to leave you with this sentence that became my mantra during my 5-month project. Don’t treat every day like the last day of a project. Try to not overkill yourself during the first weeks of it. Balance your energy so you will be working with similar excitement at the beginning and end of the project.
Not every day you will be performing at your high peak and not always you will be excited about working on the project. But you will also have amazing days that everything will be working smoothly — probably those days will come more often when you will take more breaks and not work during the nights.
Food for thought
I know that everyone has a different approach to work and has different work ethics but I would like to leave you with this comparison graphic which is based on Scheduled Overtime Effect On Construction Projects (1985) by Business Roundtable. The report basically explains that scheduled overtime hours affect efficiency and productivity on long-term projects. As initial overworking is beneficial for a short time, in the end, constant overwork for 2 months will affect our performance.
Here, I tried to visualize two approaches, the one on the left shows how our efficiency goes down when we push too much all the time and the one on the right where we work on a similar level during the whole project without over hours. Overworking all the time doesn’t mean producing more in the end. More important is the way we structure our work and how much energy we still have to stick to the schedule through the whole project. That will guide us to a successful and satisfying outcomes.
Take what is useful
Of course, you don’t have to follow all of the advice. It really depends on a person and her/his working style and approach. In my case, I really needed a clear structure to stay calm during the project but I can also imagine that it won’t work for everyone. But I wish you will take something from it and implement it in your own manner. Choose the advice that you find the most useful and stick to the plan.
Good luck, there will be a lot of fun!
