After many years of thinking about it I decided I wanted to study osteopathy. Searching around I found out about the European School of Osteopathy in Barcelona. I couldn’t study in this school because they don’t have a full time degree, so I came to Boxley in Maidstone, Kent, England where I will be studying for the next 4 years.
Who knows what will come next but definitely something new, new adventures and new perspectives for life.
Many times I wonder how to be more productive in my work, enjoy it more and live a better life. This turns out to be a complex task if you want to attain all at the same time. Sometimes you think that the more you work, the more successful you will be, and on the other hand, if you didn’t work enough –and your project doesn’t succeed– you blame it on not having invested enough hours. I will not get into detail in this mater because y think it’s pretty well explained in the 37 signals blog post: The lifestyle business bullshit; but i will mention that there is in general a common misconception which makes us believe that the more hours we work the more productive we are. From my point of view this is a bold lie. The more hours you work, in the end, the less productive you become. It turns out into spending lots of hours in front of the computer but not really focused. This is not productive, not profitable and not a good investment for your clients.
The point of this post is about productive working and how focusing on what you do improves the result of your work, and in the end your of your life. It is well known today that we are used to being interrupted in many different ways while working. Some years ago, the only interruptions came through the phone or some team member entering your office, but today there are hundreds of “interruption methods” such as mobile phones, email, chats, blogs, etc. that keep you more worried about what is happening around than what you should be doing.
These interruptions are totally against productivity and turn out into longer working hours, longer working days, less free time and in the end less happiness. What happens when a worker is not happy or hasn’t rested enough? Well that’s a very simple answer: he is less productive. So from a personal point of view and form a professional point of view we all have to be aware that we have to focus on what we are doing and avoid interruptions.
Following some of my experiences I will suggest some ways on how to work productively and spend less time working and getting more things done.
1. Avoid interruptions
This doesn’t mean that you will not talk to your colleges, to your boss or to your client. It means that you have to define review sessions with them, you have to schedule email reading for yourself, you have to switch off your chat and make a good use of the internet while working. Then, when you get back to them in a couple of hours, days or weeks and dedicate completely to them they will be even more satisfied.
2. Notify and implement your thoughts
Tell your clients/boss that you will read emails 2 or 3 times a day and that you will not answer immediately. If there is anything really urgent they should be able to reach you on the phone.
3. Work focused
Once you have set your email reading hours and your chat availability times, you can now work focused. Make a plan for the for the day and keep the overview for the week and if you can for the month. Set the daily to do list, make the most important phone calls first thing and start working on the most important to dos.
Again avoid interruptions and if someone comes in to talk to you, ask them to post pone the chat for later or for a review meeting –as it is said, ask them to consider the context.
4. Have short productive review meetings
Once a day, once a week or once a month. Meet with whom ever you must, review your work with them, gather feedback and get back to work fast. More short meetings better than one long one. Don’t wait to the last day to mention your problems. Probably the people who you are working have already faced similar problems, and talking about it with them will help you solve your problems.
5. Take responsibilities
Know which are your limitations and take the responsibilities that correspond to you. It is also well known that we take more responsibilities than we should to please the people that surround us, and in the end it goes against your productivity and your results. Then nobody will remember that it wasn’t your task and that you just took it as a favor.
6. Learn to say no
Or not now, or maybe later, or maybe never, but don’t forget to give a reasonable explanation. If your reasonings are reasonable, after 2 weeks, your attitude will be respected and no one will interrupt you.
7. Make a plan, stick to it and improvise along the way
It’s good to have a plan with review sessions and delivery dates, but it’s also good to be flexible and agile to change. If you stick too much to a plan you loose flexibility and the capability of improvising. But if you don’t have a plan you could be drifting without noticing.
8. Report and inform
Keep your boss, team or client informed all the time. Don’t wait until they ask. This will give them an overview of what you are doing and it will help you re-direct your process if needed in the right time. It will also avoid interruptions and it will make everyone happier. But don’t do it all the time, invest the right time at the right moment.
9. Review the results
This will tell you if you are drifting or not. It will let you know if you are taking the right decisions and delivering your work in realistic deadlines. Also think what could be improved and how could you use your hours better.
10. Enjoy the rest of life
Ride your bike to the office, go to the park for lunch, don’t spend money in expensive meals that will make you tired and will last too long, go dancing, take your dog out for longer walks, learn a language, take different ways to the office, stop in that bookshop, and as Mike would say: “keep a smile in your face because life is good!”
This is one of the best ads I have seen lately. And it even doesn’t have the logo on it. Are you creative? What’s in your mind then?
Yes, looks like my last posts are related to killing and death. But this one definitely has a point and it’s about the death of Internet Explorer 6. I am tired of hearing programers/front end developers complaining about the hassles of IE6. As you can read in Cristian’s post stop pixel perfection for Internet explorer 6, no more IE6 in our site and no more unnecessary work for clients that don’t care about alignment or pixel perfection.
…and because they are too many, ideas such as spec-work communities pop up like mushrooms. That’s what I read in Micah Baldwin’s blog where he posted a pretty strange way of solving this problem in his post Kill All The Designers; in which he states that “The only way to reduce the negative effects of spec work on the design industry is to make the supply of designers scarce.” Using the term killing them as a joke, but saying in a way that there are too many designers. Sorry Micah but I have a slightly different opinion than you.
As a designer working in a creative crowd-sourcing community I have to state that:
For a designer spec work sounds like bullshit. And sorry, but killing the designers is not the solution. And yes there is an overload of designers, but there is a lot of design to do in this world as well –which is highly under a good design level.
1st POINT: Spec work sounds like bullshit.
Yes for a designer it sounds like bullshit. Where last year a designer had his list of potential clients that would give him work no matter what; because they didn’t know or have access to any other, or they because they liked his work. Today, these same clients believe that by posting their task in a spec work based platform they are going to save lots of money and get lots of great ideas.
What does this mean for the designer?
Where before he had an assured income, today he has to battle against hundreds of designers for even less money than before.
Also, a client has no idea of how much time or effort it costs to develop a logo. Is it just inspiration? Is it experience? Is it sleepless night until the designer has the best solution? Or is it just photoshop skills?
No, I’m very sorry but not. Understanding what a brand needs takes some research, experience, knowledge of the market, innovative skills and especially good taste (thing that most clients believe that have but they absolutely don’t have).
What does it mean for a client to save money? It means choosing the right logo for the companyand that’s what apple did instead of having another windows crappybased design company.
Steve Jobs has an interest for harmony, design, typography and thanks to his obsession has created the most desirable products in the market now a days. For good or for bad he did this by hiring the best designers in the world.
2nd POINT: Killing designers
That’s the most stupid argument i have read in my life. And the stolen copies of photoshop is even worse.
Maybe Adobe could start thinking about opening up, selling their software cheaper and experimenting what happens when you get your prices closer to what your “potential consumers” could pay.
3rd POINT: The overload of designers
This world is overloaded, when you kick a stone (spanish expression), two hundred lawyers pop out. When you turn a corner, ten thousand architects fall on top of you. When you open a can of Campbell’s soup, five hundred unemployed cooks jump at your neck.
There are too many of us everywhere, and everyone is trying to open and run his own business –the cheapest way possible to be competitive with the rest of the market. This means that there is a chance to design this world in a better and nicer way. Why kill designers when they can make your life better, more beautiful, more productive? Sorry, I don’t get the point.
CONCLUSION
There is a chance for designers to work for lots of new businesses and startups that need design. The future needs design for innovation, for evolution, for harmony and for beauty.
Clients have to understand that they don’t have an artistic taste, and designers have to understand that they are not artists.
Clients have to trust their designers or choose some other ones, and designers have to understand that when they design a logo they are not doing ephemeral art.
What a designer is doing is solving a communication problem for a client which has to full fill the client’s need, be long-lasting and has to represent the company for which he is designing. Not represent himself as an artist.
Where does crowd-sourcing or spec work fit into this game?
For a client, spec work means cheap costs and variety of ideas. For a designer, spec work means less work (because they don’t invest such much time, which is understandable) and, most important, the chance to win new clients.
If a client is happy with his designer, he will not change just for good. For a designer satisfying the needs of a new client should be the most important thing, no matter if it’s spec-work or any kind of work. He should research and deliver the best quality if, in the end, he wants to win the client or keep the client.
On the other hand, a client will always know what is best for his company –maybe not the best way it is packed or designed– but surely what will represent him best. Because in the end the designer doesn’t have to sell the product of the company he is designing for.
But careful! Cheap can turn out to be expensive. A designer should know when to post his ideas on a spec platform and which platforms to post his ideas in, and a client should know which ideas to choose from and what kind of contract he is signing with the company that hosts the contest.
In the end, spec work is just like the weather neither good or bad, just spec work.
I believe spec work is just another tool which can satisfy the needs of some clients and not solve the needs of other’s –who’d rather work with the designers they already know, or even the ones they got to know, through a creative contest in a spec-work-based web platform.
What could this mean in the future?
Who knows. Spec work could become a mainstream tool for fast idea creation and innovation or just an inspirational place for clients.
But what is for sure is that good designers will always have work, no matter where, in spec-work based platforms or in the “real world”; where their talent will be appreciated with spec or without spec.
These are the designers that understand the needs of their clients, or potential clients via crowd-sourcing platforms, and they will always deliver high quality work –more or less elaborated depending on many other factors than just spec.
But what surely this means is that when comments and ratings are included in spec-work based platforms, clients get much more than just a fast designed logo. They get the chance of choosing between lots of filtered ideas and also feedback from the rest of the creatives that comment on the ideas. And for a creative it not only means the chance to work for clients around the world, but also the chance to learn from the feedback other creatives give them on their ideas.
In the end, as I said before, spec work is just a tool. So it’s up to every designer and every client to choose if it’s the right tool and the right moment for them to use it.
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