Design Workflows at Work

You know, I think creative people are always creative, but it manifests in different ways. The trouble I get into is when my creativity is stronger with an inconvenient medium. For instance, I may have a pressing deadline for a website but I'm totally uninspired. And yet, I feel totally creative with sewing, drawing, knitting, or some other creative outlet. So I go do that for awhile. I follow my brain where it leads and eventually (sometimes just in the nick of time) I come back to the medium I'm pressed to create for. Getting away from a stressful project inspires me the most.

This isn't an answer this audience may want to hear either, but a big part of my day starts with prayer. It's a huge, HUGE, relief knowing I'm not solely responsible for coming up with things on my own, that as I work, I have a sort of partner, guiding me. God isn't so much a muse, but a father, experienced with creating beautiful things from nothing, who lends His expertise throughout the day. I can tell a noticeable difference on the days I forget to bring God into my work.

I'm a pretty free-form person, taking what comes and running with it. I don't typically have a scheduled routine. I wake up, assess the day and get to it. For many people that doesn't work, but for me I've found that a strict schedule only leads to more stress as natural hindrances to that schedule occur. There will always be a phone call, an email, or a computer crash to interrupt a schedule, so I tend to look at things in terms of what needs to be done and when it needs to be complete and set to work, allowing for interruptions and distractions so that when they do happen I'm not totally thrown off guard. In my experience, strict schedules induce worry, which only leads to a compulsive need to be more strict about ones schedules in an effort to control outside influences. Wow, that sounds hippy-ish, doesn't it? :) I guess I just personally work better taking things as they come.

I've been able to work in either situation, but I'm a happier, saner person when I have a combination of both. I don't like being isolated for too long but I definitely need quiet space to work too. My ideal workspace would be an office, with a door, inside a larger office full of co-workers (with their own ideal setup). I'd have access to my peers without feeling corralled by them. God made us to be naturally collaborative, so we can't work totally alone, but because of that communicative nature, we can't sit quiet and still for long when we're in around others, which leads to distraction without barriers to keep us on task.

I drink a very large mocha, have some morning prayer, and have a good giggle fit with my daughter. That first laugh in the morning puts me in such a place that the day's stresses tend to roll off my shoulders pretty quickly. That, and the caffeine from the mocha working together. She's a good pray-er too, reminds me of the simplicity of our faith, that it's often not any more complicated than "God we lub you and we know you lub us, so watch over us and keep our toys safe."

I use a combination of basecamp for work and collaborative efforts, and backpack for personal things, but I'm big on paper too, something I can see and feel. I have simple manila folders, each containing a single project. I use a label maker to make removable labels for a set of colored folders for active projects. Then, as I finish projects, I archive them to plain manila folders and put them away in a file box. So the only paperwork I have out are active projects.

Then, the most active, the one I'm working on RIGHT NOW goes on a clipboard. I focus only on the clipboard project. If something comes up with one of the others, I put a note in or on the file and put it back off to the side until that project's "clipboard time". This keeps me from getting sidetracked on other projects, losing my place where I was with the current one. I swap out the clip board a couple of times a day but it's much smoother than my pre-clipboard days with files all over my desk, the floor, the kitchen table...

Phone calls are probably the worst simply because when it breaks my concentration and takes my focus away from whatever I was doing, it's immediate. With most everything else I can take second to jot down a note about what I was doing and then take the distraction where it leads.

When I worked in an office, passers-by were a big disruption, gossipers, that sort of thing, but I'm blessed to be in a home office in my basement where it's very quiet. My advice to cube-dwellers who have especially talkative visitors: make a pact with a neighboring cubie that when you tap on the wall (or cough, or some other signal), they call you and you pretend to have a very important phone call.

I force myself to get up from the computer at least every two hours, and I leave my office completely at least once during the day, usually for lunch. It's especially tough when working in the home because it's so easy to sneak away to the office, or to stay cooped up in it all day. By forcing myself to get up or get out, I find I'm much more productive in the slightly shorter time I'm at the computer.

It's silly, but my mom taught me a lot about time management as a kid when she would get after me to clean my room. I was a real lazy kid, so she would break the room into sections and challenge me to just clean one thing, like under the bed, the closet, the top of my dresser, in a set amount of time. It was more manageable and not nearly as intimidating. Although I'm not a scheduler by nature, she taught me to break things down into smaller, more manageable pieces, so my to-do list may be 5 lists with only 2-3 items in shorter time spans. Mom and I are night and day, her being a real "Monica Gellar" kind of person, so it's amazing I picked that up from her!

My clipboard. I talked about that in Q5 but that's really the big one for me. If I get stuck and can't figure out a problem or can't go anywhere new with a design concept, I grab the clipboard and a squared moleskine notebook and get out of the office for awhile. Sometimes distractions are best defeated by distracting THEM! Get away from the distraction and make your work portable.

This one I learned from my kid brother who was always bugging me when I was trying to do my homework. Some days he'd follow me around the house, making faces, pulling my ponytail, just being a boy. So instead of setting up camp to go to work on my school work, I'd make it portable so I could keep running away from him. It's stupid now that I'm typing this "outloud" but it worked. It was much easier moving my work to evade his annoyances, than it was trying to focus in one place as he bugged the crap out of me. Not to mention the more I moved the more tired he grew of following and eventually he'd stop. Make your work portable and leave distractions behind. It's unconventional, but it works for me.