Laying down the threads
Part of the role of a good designer, and anyone who has to work in projects from start to completion, is being able to pick up the threads from day-to-day to keep everything moving forward.
Through the first half dozen years of my career I struggled with this. Often I’d come back to work in the mornings and find my brain completely blank, unable to recall critical details from the previous day.
I couldn’t remember where all the pieces fit, and how they should be assembled. I’d rack my brain, look at previous designs, try to recall conversations, and check emails or messages leading up to that point. Then I’d slowly get to work, designing forward, and share progress with clients or stakeholders; all while hoping that nothing too critical had been missed.
Then the questions would surface.
- “What about this piece we were going to try yesterday?”
- “We talked about X, are we still going that direction?”
- “I thought you were going to be designing this part, not that. Why the change?”
Now granted, a lot of this was just being a junior designer and trying to find my feet. And a good designer doesn’t take every idea as must-do feedback, but rather has methods for sifting through what’s valuable and what can be set aside.
Still, important details were being lost. Context missed, pieces I intended to work on forgot.
In one meeting with a stakeholder, all of us sitting around the conference table planning out our work for the week, one colleague asked me if I could complete a specific task that day. My brain immediately froze, I was worried I’d forget it, that my system wouldn't work for recall. The thing she was requesting was important, but I had a lot of other things juggling around in my head that I was working through. So I asked her if she could email that request as a reminder.
I wasn’t asking her for the details of the request, but the request itself, “remember to do X”.
She looked at me for a moment, then turned her head to the side, eyebrows raised, and asked, “Really, Joshua?”.
That’s when it really hit home that my lack of systems was hurting me. I’d been worried that if I wrote her request down on a piece of paper it would simply get lost in the shuffle.
Now, you may be thinking, why worry about all this? If something is important enough it will resurface.
That method can work sometimes. But when you’re running deadlines with clients, managing expectations with customers, and trying to deal with varying requests from stakeholders, just letting the ball drop time and again is an immediate path to being asked to take your talents elsewhere.
What I’d prefer is to consciously decide which tasks get dropped, instead of having them disappear into the ether; lost and forgotten. The ideal, of course, is to not be too optimistic in accepting tasks in the first place, but that’s a great topic for another post.
So from that day forward I set out to fix my input and output methods. I wanted to find a task management system that worked for me. I tried everything.
At one point I carried a Moleskine notebook with my entire list of important tasks for the weeks and months ahead. Then it fell into water and in an instant I lost all sense of what I should be doing. I then tried every digital system I could find. I eventually settled on a combination of Apple Notes + Things for keeping my list of planned todos captured.1
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The other part I worked on was capturing a snapshot of the state of a project, so that I could return anytime and pick up where I left off. That morphed into what I call redlining.
Throughout the life cycle of a project I capture, in words, sketches, or screen recordings, where things stand.
At the start, if I’m picking up a brief from a stakeholder, we'll usually have a conversation where we talk through different parts of an app or website. We’ll talk through it all and discuss what features we want to change.
While we review I usually ask the stakeholder to share their screen (or share my own), and I capture screenshots, along with my notes of those screenshots.
I put all that into an Apple Note, with a date at the top and the name of the person I talked with. Every line in the note is written as a checklist, so each new sentence or thought is a todo item. My next step is to process those notes, but if I don’t have time at the end of the meeting I’ll simply throw a todo item on Things, or in the Apple Notes of the project, reminding me to come back and review them.
What I’ve done is created a frozen state where I have my complete knowledge of the project captured in that moment.
When it comes time to go back through the notes, I’ll go check off every sentence that’s irrelevant, that I’ve already considered, or that can be ignored. Then I go through and start sketching out the new design, or thinking through the project's next parts, checking off sentences as I go.
When I have a completed sketch, or one that’s far enough along, I’ll check off every item that's left in the Apple Note, and add any uncompleted items as hand written red line notes alongside the sketch.
If I have to pause again, I have a captured state of the project.
This happens all through the life cycle of the work I'm doing. At every stage there’s either literal red line notes in Freeform or Figma, or unchecked items in an Apple Note. If things get really crazy and I have a bunch of things to consider, such as email requests, Slack messages, Linear todos, and Figma comments, then the system still holds up. Best case scenario I have time to carefully go through each and consider them. But if I’m pressed for time I’ll pick the single source of truth, typically the Apple Note for the project, and add checkmarks for each of those hanging threads (along with screenshots showing a visual reminder).
This might sound a bit chaotic. But it’s a way of thinking, of ensuring that I’m consciously choosing to not do something, instead of accidentally forgetting.
It’s impossible to do everything in life that comes our way. We must necessarily prune. By having a system that presents what's available, I can consciously prioritize, and know at the end of the day that everything is in a paused state, and can be picked up the next morning without having to hold it in my head.
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