Going from motion to action

How I manage my time and continuously grow as a designer.

As a relatively baby designer, one thing I’ve been experimenting with is time management and figuring out a learning plan for how I want to grow as a designer. What skills do I need to more urgently hone? Trying to prioritise this has been a challenge in itself, and I’m always experimenting with different tools and techniques that suits my learning style, while figuring out what exactly is it I need to learn, and how to do this as effectively as possible. At the end of the day, time is awfully precious.

As designers, the industry is constantly changing. There are tons of resources online I feel compelled to check out, sexy tools I feel pressured to get ninja level at, and new methods and systems of thinking and doing to be acquainted with. It can definitely get incredibly overwhelming. I’m in fact someone who can get caught up with ‘preparing’. I often encounter points in time where I felt like I was super busy, all over the place, constantly in motion yet without any idea of where I’m headed and why.

I’m a huge fan of James Clear, and one of my favourite tips from his books is that it’s so important to see ‘motion’ and ‘action’ as two separate entities, and to establish strategies that can allow you to move from constantly being in motion to actually taking action.

Never mistake activity for action.

— John Wooden

One of the things that I can get pretty obsessive over is my weekly calendar. After ploughing through tons of articles, self-help books and even YouTube tutorials, I wanted to share what I feel works and doesn’t work based on a lot of trial and error on my part, not to mention a great amount of frustration and anxiety.

Trust me, when I first got started, I admittedly got very bogged down by frameworks and processes. Being in an environment where hustle culture is rife, productivity can almost feels like a delusive cookie-cutter technique waiting for you to decipher and manifest. I’ve come to let things go, because the entire ‘just got to do it even when you don’t want to’ mantra is dead. When stressing over planning/prioritising/timeboxing, it can only be for one reason: to meet deadlines imposed on me. That’s merely a responsibility to ensure you deliver on promises expected of you from the people that pay you. That aside, when it comes to anything else you’re pursuing, learning to freestyle your learning will make more sense (plus, your mental health will thank you).

These are some ideas/ tips that I’d love to share for junior designers looking to figure out what they need to learn, and how they can best effectively do that.

Designing my own plan for action

1. Identifying what I need to know through self-assessment.

Product design is a vast field. When I envision what success looks like to me, I know I want to reach a level where I am relatively comfortable (and confident!) with seeing a product from start to finish. This means ultimately shaping myself up for success as a T-shape designer (jack of all, master of one!).

By assessing my own skill level in different areas, I am better able to decide what general topic/ themes I want to focus on. Checking out common career frameworks and taking some time to read through different career rubrics, it does help me feel less anxious about what I need to know NOW as opposed to what I can afford knowing LATER. This lets me tackle information overload in a more manageable, bite-sized manner.

8 core competencies of UX practitioners

Mapping my own skill level against the 8 core competencies of UX practitioners reveals themes and topics that I want to focus on in the medium-term. While I may not be an expert at self-assessment, I aim to be as transparent as possible with my own competencies and try not to get too bogged up with being entirely accurate. While other peers may rate me differently than how I’d rate myself, I try to be conscious about aspects to my own personal growth that only I am well aware of. I think about my own personal goals, and map my skill level based not only on competency but also other factors such as comfort, confidence and interest levels.

TIP #1: Don’t go down the rabbit hole. You just want some concrete real world facts that can help you reflect on what you know and don’t know. Take note of how you feel when you reflect on certain skillsets. If it makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably because you know your lack of knowledge wouldn’t even cut it for the ‘fake it till you make it’ pretence. If you know you are likely to need to show your expertise in this area (either because it’s something you’re employing immediately in your current job, or a requirement for a pathway you’re aspiring towards), then shortlist this skillset, and move on to crafting a learning plan. You’ll figure how to tackle any other competencies later.

2. Planning my week in a way that makes the most sense to me.

I’ve experimented with different ways to plan my week. Notion templates, physical to-do lists, Kanban boards… None of them have really stuck if I may say so myself, which led me to feel incredibly confused and frustrated. I often wonder if it was a problem of habit or a lack of discipline, however I’ve come to realise that reflecting on what works/ doesn’t work for me is the first step to finding what might eventually resonate with my own learning style.

When planning my week, I’ve gotten rid of the notion of dividing my days into tons of to-dos waiting to be checked off. Often we are told to put the most difficult or important task first, which can make sense to some extent, but I realise that it can be rather anxiety-inducing and energy-draining, ultimately leading to burnout.

Right now, this is how I typically plan my week:

• Plan my week on Sundays
• Typically keep Saturdays free for personal hobbies
• Using an overview calendar, create tasks according to 4 priority levels: Highest, High, Medium, Low (weighing both energy required + urgency of task)
• Avoid allocating ‘Highest’ priority tasks on Thursdays and Fridays
• Start with ‘High’ priority tasks, before going into ‘Highest’, to avoid stress first thing in the morning and feeling drained too quickly
• Avoid getting too granular too soon — I only detail sub-tasks on the day itself using checklists, while giving a general time estimate
• Add action items following the completion of each task, should I fail to complete sub-tasks or stumble upon newer information I may need to review another day
• Repeat

Here’s a sample weekly agenda I have created on Notion:

Weekly agenda sample

TIP #2: When working on a task, you’d probably also be actively sitting on meetings related to said project, reviewing documents, learning new information with each day. If you’re not one to document your projects on a daily basis, this can act as a quick way to collect snippets of a project over time (plus, you probably will note little quirky bits, stumbling blocks) that would be a good starting ground when writing case studies in future.

TIP #3: Things don’t always go as plan. I add a KIV label and have a separate view to consolidate all KIV items. I review this every now and then as it acts a backlog for future design items. Or if new information surfaces that might make this task obsolete, then I remove it altogether. Tracking your KIVs remind you of i) potential design initiatives you could take up when there is a bandwidth to do so, ii) a quick cursory glance of how your company’s product roadmap have been reprioritised.

I’ve found that this mode of planning has worked super well for me, considering that I no longer feel the pressures on Sundays to already have a detailed idea of how the coming week must look like. Plus, depending on the type of task, each task can either be left as an empty page or a template I’ve created to suit my own needs.

3. Layer your personal learning plan over work commitments.

TIP #4: Keep this hella freestyle. When it comes to work, perhaps it makes sense to divvy things up into smaller chunks based on deliverables and output expected. When thinking about personal learning, envision a more ‘organised chaos’ approach.

After identifying what skillsets I might want to focus on in the near-term, and having time-boxed my work commitments, that’s when I start thinking about how to find time to explore and deep dive into my interested subjects.

Say I’m looking into exploring UX research so I can inculcate a more design-oriented research practice at work. I probably have a few books I shortlisted that I want to read. When planning time for this, I often map out weekly intentions, mostly because I often stumble into newer pieces of information along the way. Remember that at this juncture, you’re exploring unchartered territory. You probably won’t finish that UX research book in one-go. You’ll read a chapter here, identify a gap in your knowledge, do much research, pluck more resources. The most important thing is this step is to simply take notes (however you like), reflect on how you can apply it in your current situation and stay curious. There’s no need to compartmentalise everything you learnt immediately (you’re not studying for an exam!) and get too bogged down with organising your notes. Most likely it’s just for your eyes and for your future reference.

4. Give and take. In other words, not taking it too seriously.

Creating a system for how I structure my learning required a lot of trying and failing. It’s not possible to create a closed ecosystem of my own knowledge — information flows in as often as they slip out, and what has been the most enlightening as I reflected on all my attempts to govern my learning, was accepting and internalising a ‘give and take’ approach.

When I plan to accomplish X number of things in a day, I remind myself that it’s a give or take. On my best days, I might be able to accomplish all of them and maybe even more, but I need to be comfortable with days that may be a bit of a lull.

Often times learning can become very passive (and I’m awfully guilty of that), where I’m simply a sponge absorbing every kinds of information that gets flung my way.

TIP #5: When you don’t see the results immediately, or you have trouble applying what you learn into something concrete at your current job, trust that you know your stuffs and that the information is simply lying in your brain, very much alive. You’ll never know when some knowledge comes in handy and perhaps you might forget it in a bit. But trust that when the need arises, you’ll pick it up much more effectively than before. And most importantly, know that learning should not always serve as a means to an end. If you had fun and enjoyed yourself while you’re at it, enough said.

Also, rather than passively taking in bits of info everyday, aim to actively give what you have to others as well. This doesn’t always have to be a form of a Medium article (the irony), or anything to drive clicks on LinkedIn/ social media. This can come in the form of quick little thought nuggets when working with others at work or things you share with designers in your community. When I do this, it prompts me to reflect on how I can articulate what I know to others, while also testing my true grasp of a particular subject. Whether it truly lands into someone else’s lap is merely a bonus.

5. Carving time & space for playground activities as well as personal life.

Using weekly calendars to structure my work + learning plan can be a double-edged sword. It’s easy to start getting tunnel-visioned, and to tune out to other random topics that may pique my interest. Inspiration can strike from nowhere, and often from reading books to listening to podcasts, I tend to have random spurts of energy wanting to do something that I had not planned time for.

I do truly believe that other creative pursuits is key in developing my product design competencies. I’m trying everyday to detach my own self-worth from my professional work, and to decouple work and leisure. While my learning plan includes other ‘creative’ tasks, I consciously take breaks between work tasks for my own personal life, whether it’s hanging out with friends, going for Pilates classes or reading my favourite historical fiction books.

6. Listening for feedback, and clues for further action to take.

One career cheat code I recently learnt about is regarding being the go-to-person for a particular thing. While I believe product design skills can be learnt, I do know that we all have a natural tendency to be stronger at a particular niche, whether that’s user research or visual design. And the best way to learn what my stronger suit may be was to listen to what others have to say about my work.

When I was first transitioning into design through a bootcamp, while I was actively pouring in more hours and effort in later parts of the design process i.e. interaction/ UI design, I noticed that a great amount of praises from my mentor was related to research and usability testing. This tends to be about how I articulated and documented user insights and how I utilised these findings to inform my design decisions. This is not to say that I would pretend my weaknesses don’t exist, but rather, I feel more equipped to strategise how I’d like to grow as a designer.

I am a huge believer in listening to my gut intuition, and on trusting my heart than my head. Perhaps that’s a personality thing, but I do feel comforted knowing that my strong suit often reflects what I am naturally drawn to, and that leveraging my strong suit would bring me closer to my career goals without making me feel pigeonholed at work. It’s easy to discount my own merits, so while being self-aware is still work-in-progress, listening to others for clues on my capabilities definitely facilitates this process.

7. Tracking and reflecting on progress. Iterating where it’s needed.

The most important thing for me when reflecting on how my week is progressing, is practicing kindness, and this can come in multiple forms:

• Not being caught up with incomplete tasks or sub-tasks
• Altering my daily agenda, considering other commitments + emotional + energy levels
• Time-boxing, and moving on to the next task even if I may not be 100% satisfied with the outcome
• Journalling how I feel and next steps, while documenting (and celebrating) small wins!

I’ve learnt that forgiving myself for not being 100% perfect helps me to start a new week equally excited about work. Reflecting also helps me tweak this self-designed system so that it suits my needs better, while at the same time, feeling proud that regardless the outcome, one thing I know for sure is that I was successful in showing up and taking action.

Summary

To create a learning plan that successfully gets me from motion to action requires:

1. Identifying what I need to know through self-assessment.
2. Planning my week in a way that makes the most sense to me.
3. Layer your personal learning plan over work commitments.
4. Give and take. In other words, not taking it too seriously.
5. Carving time & space for playground activities as well as personal life.
6. Listening for feedback, and clues for further action to take.
7. Tracking and reflecting on progress. Iterating where it’s needed.