Design Workflows at Work

When I absolutely have to buckle down, there's no choice but to put on the headphones and get down to it. I usually try to avoid it because I love an open environment and I hate missing out on what's going on, but sometimes you just have to be alone (or as isolated as you can get in a room full of people) and crank on it. Headphones are a friendly signal to everybody else that you're in the zone, but I've also found that it puts my brain in a mode of avoiding distractions. I'm somehow less likely to jump out to check feeds or email when I've got noise-canceling headphones on. Something about being cut off from real-world distractions makes it easier to stay focused on one thing in the virtual world.

I've never worked at a place where it was even remotely possible to predict on a daily basis what the priority was going to be. I think that's one reason I gravitated to GTD - it gave me a systematic way to adapt on the fly to chaotic priorities and emergencies.

I've always worked in a pretty open environment, so I don't have much to compare it to. I definitely like a lot of things about it though, and would probably pick openness over privacy if I had to choose. The distractions can definitely be frustrating sometimes, especially when you need to get a flow going, but the benefits are worth it. Just having conversations out in the open, where people who normally wouldn't be involved can weigh in has led to some really great results. Even conversations I don't participate in still keep me clued in to where the rest of the team is going and what they're thinking about. It saves a lot of formal planning and meeting time because everybody is plugged in to some degree to what everybody else is doing. It can definitely get out of control, especially with larger groups, but it's a great way to work if you can make it work.

I always start with a cup of coffee, whether I'm working at home or at the office. I think more than the caffeine, it's just a signal to my body and brain that the day has started and it's time to shift modes. When I work from home, I almost always shower and get dressed and put on real shoes. It sounds ridiculous, but it triggers something in my brain that doesn't happen when I'm sitting around in pajamas and slippers.

I'm a GTD convert, and I've been using Ethan's Kinkless system for a while now. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. I do most of my project planning there, and when things get really frantic I pull out a sheet of paper from the stack I keep on my desk, grab a Sharpie and start writing things down. Usually, when things settle down again, I'll unload whatever's left over from the ad hoc lists back into the project list and keep going.

I have a real tendency to try to tackle things as they come in, which only works a small fraction of the time. I also share my generation's short attention span, so I'm constantly taking quick "breaks" from whatever I'm working on to check email and talk to people, which inevitably leads to something else to work on. The great thing about GTD isn't that it keeps me from doing that, it's that when I do get sidetracked (usually on something that's equally important as what I was working on) I have a record of what else I'm ignoring, how long I've got before those other things become really urgent, and what I need to do when I'm done.

Every job I have has a different kind of collective workflow. Even down to the way project files are organized or what template language or naming convention we use - I always seem to get in a particular groove at work and then I start to do everything that way, at home, personal projects, whatever. And then I take a little bit of that to the next job or project, and combine it with whatever I assimilate from the new place.

It probably has something to do with listening to the Battlestar Galactica podcast and watching Studio 60 too much, but lately I've been really interested in how TV writers work as a model for larger creative teams. When you think about the setup and try to map the roles, it actually works out in an interesting way. On a TV show, you've got the head writer who's responsible for the whole show. He's a lot like a creative director. Yeah, he'll actually get in and write an episode now and then, but usually he's responsible for keeping the whole show cohesive and working individual show scripts to make sure the plotlines and characters work into the whole arc of the show.

Then you've got the staff writers, who are like the designers. Every show (project) is assigned to one or two writers, who are responsible for the script for that show. All these individuals or paris go off and start working on their shows by themselves so you have lots of shows in development at once. But the great concept I think we can steal from TV writers is the writers room. Every day (or week or whatever) all the writers get together in a big room and talk about the show. The individual writers talk about the episode they're working on: Here's where we are, here's what we've got, but this isn't working and we're stuck on this... and the whole group hashes it out. The lead writer says you can't do this because it breaks continuity with what we're going to do over here, and all the staff writers throw in ideas and you get this huge chaotic unstructured brainstorm. But at the end, it's up to the individual writers to take or leave whatever was thrown out in the room. It's their episode, they decide what stays or goes. They work on the script some more, then they go back into the room and it happens all over again. You can't do this, what if you tried this, and then they take it or leave it.

And then when the script is done, sometimes the lead writer takes it and changes it or rewrites the whole thing, because it's his damn show. And then the director gets it, and the actors interpret it, and the editor cuts it up, and all the time the lead writer and the episode writers are involved in the conversation. And it moves down the line through production and everybody makes their mark and in the end it might turn out to be something totally different from the original script, but if everything works and everybody trusts each other, usually it's something better, or bigger for all the work.

The mapping sort of breaks down - it's not like the cameraman is the CSS guy and the FX crew is the programmers - but the idea of the production process being an extension of the creative process is important. The creative process of molding the show doesn't stop with the writing, just like it doesn't stop with the design for us.

I haven't worked it all out yet, but I think there's something great in that balance between individual ownership of a project and total collaboration that is really great.

I worked with this guy Jeff once, he was a total slackass, but he never got fired, so that was an inspiration to me to be a slackass too (Editor's note: Jeff actually has been fired, he just left that part off his résumé when he applied for the job working with Wilson.)

Sorry, what? I was just checking my feeds again.