Friday 31 October 2014

Why Can’t The Boring Designer Have Style? - Vanseo Design

Why Can’t The Boring Designer Have Style? - Vanseo Design

Why Can’t The Boring Designer Have Style?

Posted: 30 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Are you the kind of designer who wants to show off your style as a designer or are you a boring designer who chooses the tried and true solution and tries to leave no trace of yourself in your work?


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Trent walton pointed me to an article by Cap Watkins called The Boring Designer. It made the rounds a couple of weeks ago so maybe you’ve seen it already. If not it’s definitely worth a read.

Coincidentally iOS developer David Smith (you might know him as underscore as in _DavidSmith) podcasted on this very same topic while I was working on this post. Also worth a listen if you’d like a different perspective.

The Boring Designer

In his article, Cap is championing the boring designer and says he looks for the boring solution, the one visitor’s already know and are comfortable using. He’s an advocate of the solution that’s known to work

The thing is, I’ve suggested the opposite at times. I’ve suggested it’s ok to add something of yourself to a design and I still think it’s true. Cap’s article points out five things about boring designers. They:

  • Choose obvious over clever every time—Boring designers prioritize user experience over everything else.
  • Rarely stand their ground—Boring designers are open to new ideas. They explore ideas to find the right idea and don’t get locked into their own idea.
  • Are Practical—Boring designers understand that time and budget are limited and they work within project constraints.
  • Value Laziness—Boring designers place no personal stamp on a design. They use style guides and value constraints. Modular design helps with their laziness.
  • Lead the team —Boring designers are trusted by others. This one isn’t relevant to me as a freelancer. I suppose I lead clients where the design is concerned.

Here’s a quote from the value laziness section of the article

The boring designer realizes that the glory isn't in putting their personal stamp on everything they touch. In fact, most of the time, it's about leaving no trace of themselves. The boring designer loves consistency.

The general idea is the boring designer focuses on usability. He or she puts the user first. I completely agree, but…

Why is it Obvious, Clever, or Nothing?

I have a question. Why are your choices limited to obvious, clever, or nothing? Why does something that does something different have to be about being clever? Can’t it be someone doing something different because they genuinely think the new way is better?

Very little is obvious the first time you encounter it. The obviousness comes through repetition much of the time. It can also come through affordances. You can design some things in a way that the object itself suggests how it should be used.

For example a door knob is circular and just looks like something you turn, certainly more than something you would push or pull, even though you might do either after turning. An emergency door on the other hand with it’s bar extending across is indicating it wants to be pushed.

Both are designed in a way that suggests how they work. Perhaps obvious isn’t really the right word and intuitive is the better word to use.

In this context I find it interesting that the recent trend away from skeuomorphism and toward flat design is the exact opposite of designing affordances. A button is a more intuitive design for something you click than different colored text or a rectangle with a background color.

Removing depth and detail reduces the intuitiveness and obviousness of design elements. Something tells me people who support boring design aren’t also calling for a return to skeuomorphism.

It’s ok. Most of the things that are obvious on web pages, things like clicking blue underlined text, are learned. They’re obvious because we’ve seen them so many times before. There was a point where it wasn’t obvious at all. That’s why the skeuomorphic aesthetic was used in the first place.

Someone had to be the first to put a collection of links in a list and make it a vertical menu. Someone was the first to turn the same list of links into a horizontal navigation bar.

Was a hamburger icon obvious the first time you saw it? Is it obvious now? It will be soon if it isn’t yet. It’s becoming synonymous for menu. It will eventually be obvious to most people even though it wasn’t at first and probably still isn’t obvious to the majority yet.

I don’t think it’s just trying to be clever to try something new and less than obvious. Trying something you think is a better solution is a good thing If you’re right others will adopt your practice and it will become obvious.

Taking web design further requires breaking from convention at times. It’s not only ok, it’s good to break from convention here and there. Not always, but sometimes. You should have a good reason for deviating from the standard.

Most of the time the obvious solution will be the best solution. However, you should understand being used a lot doesn’t automatically make it the best solution. It makes it a popular solution. It could be popular because it is a truly good solution, but it doesn’t have to be.

To say you can’t ever break from obvious isn’t good advice in my opinion. It’s too rigid. It’s good to make people think sometimes.

What’s Wrong with Style?

My other disagreement with the boring designer is the idea that there’s something wrong with your own style being present in a finished design. Why is that automatically a bad thing?

Even if you don’t think so, you definitely are adding something of your personal style into every one of your designs. It would be impossible not to.

You and I have different sets of skills. If we both design the same site, the site will look different. If we each design 10 sites, others will likely be able to tell which sites were designed by the same person.

As long as you add something consistent across designs you’ve added something of your own style. Maybe you code navigation bars the same way. Maybe you work similar set of colors or typefaces. These consistencies become your style.

Compare the portfolios of different designers. There will be a consistency across designs by the same designer. The sites won’t necessarily look the same, but there will be something consistent in them. It will be a different consistency than that of another designer. Each is that person’s style.

A personal style doesn’t mean you make everything about aesthetics. It means you have your own personal consistencies that carry across your work.

Let’s assume by style we mean something more than consistency. Maybe in this conversation we mean adding a little above and beyond just to get something of yourself in there.

I still think it’s fine as long as it doesn’t take away anything from the project. You can’t do whatever you want on a project. The goals of the project have to come first, but there are multiple ways to solve any design problem.

Your style shouldn’t be something you force on to a project, but as long as you’re solving the problem you’ve been hired to solve there’s nothing wrong with solving it in a way that’s more distinctly you than distinctly another designer.

My point is you can build usable, functional, reliable sites, with a focus on being practical and consistent with standards and still add something of yourself to the design. Don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

It’s something that will happen regardless of whether or not you think you’re adding your own style. As long as you don’t hurt the project it’s ok to add something of your personality to it.

Modular Design is Boring, but Does it Have to Be?

Obvious over clever means sticking to standards, the expected, what’s already known to work. That often means making things modular and repeating design and coding patterns from one project to the next.

Modular patterns also fit well with the idea of valuing laziness. It enhances consistency and doesn’t require doing the same work again and again.

Someone has to choose the patterns from which to build the obvious. Someone has to choose the constraints that lead to the patterns choices.

You might be familiar with the idea of a type palette. You pick a few typefaces that can serve your needs for text and display type. You pick a script font and slab serif and a serif, etc. You build a varied enough palette from which you can always choose typefaces that will work with your project. Your palette consistently used becomes part of your style.

You can have palettes for color and palettes for layout too. Your palettes (your constraints) will be different than the palettes of another designer so each becomes part of that designer’s style.

Whether you want to accept it or not there’s an arbitrariness to choosing items in a palette. You might objectively narrow down all possibilities to a few, but from there personal choice will find the items you place in your palette.

I’ve been trying to get across the idea that design is subjective for awhile. A certain amount of the decisions you make will be arbitrary. They won’t be as objectively determined as you want to believe. If you think all your decisions are 100% objective you aren’t paying attention to yourself or humanity.

If you stick with a palette and consistent design patterns then you are working lazy and choosing obvious over clever like a boring designer. You’re also injecting something of your personal style into every design you create.

If consistency and laziness are goals then you’re going to do the same things the same way across projects and whatever the consistency, it’s your style.

You shouldn’t try to make any specific project about you and your work and style. You should always be about the project first, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be in there too. You will be anyway. You might as well control your contribution.

You absolutely have to think project first and if it doesn’t belong in the project or it doesn’t enhance the client’s brand it doesn’t belong in the design. But accept that there is no single best solution to a design problem. There are many choices you make during a design and as soon as you start making what will be subjective and sometimes arbitrary decisions you’re injecting your style into your designs.

With these types of choices if you think project first and you stay consistent with certain things across projects, you develop a recognizable style that does nothing to detract from the projects you work on.

Do read Cap’s post about The Boring Designer and listen to the followup by David Smith. It may sound like I completely disagree with the every idea of the boring designer, but I don’t. There’s a lot to like in the article, even if I am disagreeing with parts of it.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday 28 October 2014

How I Use Things To Set Up A GTD Workflow - Vanseo Design

How I Use Things To Set Up A GTD Workflow - Vanseo Design

How I Use Things To Set Up A GTD Workflow

Posted: 27 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Understanding how a system like GTD works is the theory. You have to put the theory into practice to gain any benefit. Typically that means finding a tool to store all your tasks and setting it up in a way so you can make use of the system.

For the last few weeks I’ve been talking about focus and productivity. I mentioned Getting Things Done (GTD) as the system I use and the difficulty using GTD for creative tasks and projects.

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One negative of GTD is it was written with a pre-digital focus. It holds a very physical paper and physical inbox view of work. It would be great if the book were updated. Using email or phone as a context meant something 20 years ago. It really doesn’t today, when you almost always have access to both.

There’s nothing wrong with using physical tools to organize your tasks and I’m sure it works fine for some, but we live in a digital world now and most of us will use digital tools to manage our tasks.

Things for Mac

My tool of choice for managing tasks is Things by Cultured Code. It’s a Mac only app and there are versions for OS X, the iPhone, and the iPad. I only have the OS X version at the moment and it’s that version I’ll be talking about.

If you work on another operating system, I realize many of the specifics that follow won’t apply to you, though I suspect they can still help you set up a GTD workflow in a different app. It might even help something about GTD make a little more sense.

When I was looking for an app the choices were basically Things or OmniFocus. The latter is probably the better app if you want to strictly follow GTD and it’s the app David Allen recommends.

I chose Things in part because it’s more flexible and while you can use a GTD workflow with it, you don’t have to. Things also has a shallower learning curve and in the end I thought it was better designed and I enjoyed using it more.

At the top of this post is a screenshot of the app with an empty inbox. If you look down the left hand sidebar, you’ll notice there are four main sections.

  • Collect
  • Focus
  • Active Projects
  • Areas

Collect is where you add new items to your inbox for processing. Focus is a mix of organization and viewing what’s in your system. Active Projects and Areas help you organize tasks multiple tasks into a directory like structure.

The Focus Section

The Focus section provides different filtered views about your tasks. You use the views in this section to find the tasks and projects you’ll work on when you’re ready to work on them.

The Today view is a Things addition and not something that comes from GTD. I tend to move items into the Today view and work off that list each day. It’s not how you should work GTD, but I can’t seem to break the habit.

Next is the view you should work from most of the time. Within the Next view you can select the different criteria to filter your tasks. Things uses a tagging system so you aren’t limited to the four criteria of GTD. For example I have a tag for each client so I can quickly find tasks specific to each.

I use the Scheduled view as a reminder to look at something. On Friday I’ll schedule a few tasks to appear on different days the following week. I currently have a task set to call a client Thursday at 1:00 PM. The task is scheduled to appear in my Today view Thursday morning so I don’t forget.

Note: For those of you who worry about things such as these, my scheduled task reminded me to make the call like it was supposed to. My client and I had a pleasant conversation and there was much rejoicing.

The Someday view is for projects with loftier goals like write a novel or sail around the world. I also move projects I’m not currently working on, but will again, into Someday so they become inactive projects. It helps to keep the list of active projects more manageable. In this view I have projects like redesign this site, which I’ll do someday, but not in the next few weeks or even months.

Projects and Areas

Projects and Areas are where your tasks are organized. The Projects listed under the Focus section include all your projects (both active and someday) and those under Active Projects are the ones currently set as active.

I have both Active Projects and Areas closed in the screenshot (sorry I can’t show everything in them), but to give you an idea how I have things organized, a project might be site maintenance for a client and all the specific requests from a client will be tasks within. The project can be set as a recurring project if the tasks repeat each month. Another active project I currently have set is to work on a series of guest articles for another site that I’m sure you know.

The client who’s site I’m maintaining and the website for which the article is being written will both be Areas and each can have several projects at any given time. The site might have “write series X” and “write article Y” as projects The client might have projects to add a shopping cart or build a mailing list signup form.

Adding Items to Your Inbox

A keystroke combination will open a new window (see image below) where you can add any new item to the sytem. You have the option to select where the task goes (anything under Collect or Focus) and if it’s part of a project. You can also assign tags, notes, and a due date if necessary.

title

I usually dump everything into my inbox for later processing, but soemtimes I’ll process items as I add them to the system.

Tagging Tasks to Add Filtering Criteria

You create and use tags in Things to add the different criteria (context, time, energy, priority). I don’t bother with priority since I don’t find it helpful, though I do have tags set up for it. You can see some exampes of tags I have set up for each criteria in the image to the right or listed below.

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  • Context ( @work, @home, @errands )
  • Time ( < 15 minutes, < 30 minutes, < 1 hour, +hour )
  • Type of work (mental energy) ( creative, analytic, busy work )

Instead of high, medium, low for mental energy, I prefer to use the type of work. I need a differnet energy for creative work and analytic work. Busy work is for those times when I have little mental energy of any kind. Again, one reason for choosing Things was so I could be more flexible with the system.

I have tags for different areas of focus so I can filter next actions based on the area. Since my areas of focus are mostly clients (me being one), it helps me quickly find what I need to do for a specific client. Other areas of focus are this site, my forum, this blog, and general home projects are all included under the me category.

You can nest tags as I’ve done with the time criteria. This way all tasks that will take less than 15 minutes will also be listed when I select less than 30 minutes or an hour. If they weren’t nested then tasks 15 minutes and under would only show under that specific tag.

I’ve experimented with tags for specific devices or apps. I tried being more specific about the type of work (design, development, writing, marketing, etc.) I have tags like email and phone that I sometimes use, but I don’t find these useful as I always have my phone and a way to email within reach.

Reviews are Important

I do a quick daily review to make sure I catch any time sensitive tasks. I find wrapping up the week with a review on Friday afternoons very helpful. How in-depth of a review I do depends on how I’m feeling that particular day. I make sure to review all tasks and active projects every week, but the bigger picture stuff is more when I have time and energy.

As I’m nearing the end of a project I start to spend more time with my inactive projects and decide which will become active. Part of my recent lack of focus is I have to get through a bunch of single tasks across a variety of projects so my active project list is larger than I like.

A Better Things

While I like the flexibility Things offers and while you can use it to set up a GTD workflow, there are a couple of features that would make it much easier to use.

The first is a greater abiity to nest projects. Nearly all of my projects involve subprojects. Right now the best you can do is elevate every subproject to project status and then group them inside an Area of Focus. It works to a degree, but more ability to nest projects would be better.

A way to set tasks in series or parallel would also be appreciated. Nothing special is needed for parallel tasks. For tasks that need to be perfomed in series there’s a hack to make it work.

Inside any project you can organize the tasks in any order you like. You can then set projects to show the next 1–9 tasks. Organizing tasks in the order they need to be performed and then showing only the next task is like seeing the next item in the series and not seeing more until the first one is completed.

Unfortunately it means for every set of tasks in series you need to create a new project in Things. Without the ability to nest projects it can get unmanageable in a hurry. You also set how many tasks to show for all projects and not per project so it’s either all series or all parallel. With better nesting this wouldn’t be an issue, but the ability to nest projects isn’t there.

While Things can use a few features to make it work better with GTD, I can also do a better job working with the app. I really should work off the Next view and use Today for tasks that are truly time sensitive. My system of tagging can probably be improved as well.

Closing Thoughts

Things isn’t the only tool you can use to manage tasks and projects in a GTD system. OmniFocus is probably the first app people reach for on the Mac and iOS side of things.

If you’re interesting in learning more about either, you can watch screencasts of the tools in action at Don McAllister’s Screencasts Online. Not every screencast is free to watch, but the ones about Things and OmniFocus are. If you search the site you can find more videos using each for iOS.

I don’t have recommendations beyond Things or OmniFocus. Things is the only app I’ve used in practice and I spent some time using OmniFocus when making my choice. If you search for GTD and your operating system of choice you can find others as well as some online only apps.

There’s one more topic to get to in this series. Next week I’ll look again at GTD and Things, specifically how I manage to include creative work into the system.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday 24 October 2014

“Type on Screen” Review - Vanseo Design

“Type on Screen” Review - Vanseo Design

“Type on Screen” Review

Posted: 23 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Earlier in the year I was offered a review copy of Ellen Lupton’s new book, “Type on Screen.” My immediate response was yes, send me a copy. Ellen’s earlier book “Thinking with Type” is one of my favorite books about typography so why wouldn’t I want more?


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

My plan was to give the book a quick read and then post a review. Unfortunately, as I was writing my own book, it was hard to find the time to read another.

I also wasn’t sure what to think of the book after I finally could read it. I held some preconceived expectations based on “Thinking with Type” and after finishing “Type on Screen” a part of me was disappointed. I wanted it to be Thinking with Type for the Web, which isn’t fair to the book and probably wouldn’t have worked. It would have required a lot of repetition between the two.

Because I thought my opinion was too influenced by incorrect expectations, it didn’t seem fair to review the book. Recently though, I came across a review of “Type on Screen” by John Boardley of I Love Typography.

John described the book as “a fascinating typographic inventory of the present.” As soon as I read that description I knew John was exactly right and it helped me get at what I really thought about the book and hence this post.

A Quick Note About Reviews

Some of you may be wondering how to get review copies of books. As someone who loves to read, I’m always excited when someone wants to send me a free book. You might like to have free books sent to you as well and want to know how to make it happen.

I have no idea. I wish I could offer a series of steps, but I can’t. Somewhere along the way I reviewed a book I had read. I think it was a review of the Smashing Mobile book, but it’s possible there was one prior that I’m not remembering.

The next thing I knew I was receiving offers for review copies of other books. It doesn’t happen often, maybe once every few months. I’m guessing someone searching for reviews found mine and added my name and email address to a list of people to send review copies to in the future.

When writing a review I try to stay as objective as possible, though I do prefer to point out more good than bad. I don’t want people rushing out to buy or not buy just because of something I said. I’d rather my review be one among many that helps them decide.

If a book is truly awful, I won’t review it. It has happened a couple of times and no I won’t name the books. I know how difficult it is to finish any book good or bad.

I also don’t know what I’d say in an entirely negative review other than don’t buy the book. I suppose I could come up with something humorous, but it would likely be at the author’s expense, and being an author myself, that’s not something I want to do. In the end I’m just one person with an opinion and you should read any review in that light.

My Expectations

Before getting to the review let me share something of the expectations I held before reading. I think the context is important to the review and to understand my opinion or the book.

As I said above, “Thinking with Type” is one of my favorite books about typography. I list it right up there with Bringhurst’s “Typographic Manual of Style.” It discusses type from the inside out, starting with letters, then text, and finally grids. It’s more what I expect from a book about typography.

I was expecting a similar book with “Type on Screen,” though with a focus on the web instead of print. I thought the book might include topics like the difference in choosing typefaces for the web as opposed to print and how to use webfonts and recognize the good from the bad. Maybe there would be talk about building grids for the web and advice for pairing typefaces when used online.

I was expecting something more like “Thinking with Type” but about type for the web instead of print. It wasn’t fair of me to hold those expectations.

Just before recording the audio for this post, I looked at the back cover and preface of “Type on Screen” and see no mentions of “Thinking with Type”. Where I assumed “Type on Screen” would be a followup, nothing in the book indicates it was written with that in mind.

Both books do have the same subtitle (A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Developers, and Students), but it’s not something I noticed until after reading.

Also it’s type on screen and not type on the web. I wasn’t expecting talk about ebooks, but that’s more on me being a web designer and forgetting at times that the world doesn’t revolve around me and what I do. Screen doesn’t have to equal web. It just means screen.

Bear all this in mind as you read the review. I have a feeling I’m leaning a little more toward the negative than is fair and I suspect it’s to do with my preconceived ideas. Another reason why context is important I suppose.

What the Book is About

John Boardley’s description of the book is a good one. “Type on Screen” is a collection of things designers have done with type, what designer’s are currently doing with type, and where type on screen might go in the coming years.

Here’s the table of contents with a few words about what’s in each chapter.

  • 01 Fonts on Screen—is about web fonts and a little about type anatomy.
  • 02 Text on Screen—discusses type in terms of size, measure, leading, and typographic grids.
  • 03 Digital Publishing—deals with the flow of content in different mediums. For example should type in ebooks be infinite scroll or paged? It talks about other mediums like the web as well as different devices and device sizes.
  • 04 Type and Interface—discusses the use of type in labels, headings and data tables. More details on this chapter below.
  • 05 Icons and Logotypes—is about type in pictures. It looks at imagery as communication.
  • 06 Animation and Code—offers a bit about animation in general and more about type moving across different screens.

The first two chapters were more of what I was expecting before the book took an unexpected turn for me in chapter 3. Here’s a little more detail about what you can find in the chapter on Type and Interface. Below are the sections in the chapter.

  • Wireframes
  • Interaction Elements
  • Menus
  • Type as Navigation
  • Expanding the Vocabulary
  • Drop Shadows and Gradients
  • Hide and Reveal
  • Typography and Data Display
  • Designing Data Tables
  • Data Tables: Dos and Don’ts

At the end of this and all chapters are case studies and a section called in the classroom showing student work. The text is not densely packed as much as it is a few paragraphs surrounded by illustrative examples. That’s fairly typical of most design books I’ve read.

The book is an easy read (except when you’re writing a book and don’t have time). Most, perhaps all, of the book was assembled by Ellen’s students. And again there are plenty of illustrative examples for explanation and inspiration.

The text is more a compilation of bite-sized information that offers a general overview of each subtopic and the role type plays on different screens. While I wanted a deeper exploration of topics, this broader view covering a variety of topics probably makes more sense for this book. Otherwise it probably would be a too much duplication from “Thinking with Type.”

For much of the book, type seems like the context more than the subject. For example icons and logos are certainly related to type. They perform a similar function to communicate, but is it type? Does it belong in a book on type?

I suppose it depends on what you want from a book on type. I don’t see any reason logos and icons can’t be included in a book on type and it was a good addition here. It’s just not what I expect to find.

Who Should Read “Type on Screen?”

In the end I don’t think I’m the ideal audience for the book. I still think my disappointment was more me than the book, but I don’t think I was ever the right audience. That doesn’t mean the book is bad. Just that is wasn’t for me.

That raises the question who is the book for? If you’ve worked on the web for any measurable length of time, especially if you’ve spent time learning about and working with type, you likely know much of what’s inside the book already.

I’m sure there will be some new nuggets of information for you, but you’re probably familiar with a lot of it. I wouldn’t read the book to learn how to work with typography, however, it will probably bring up a few things you haven’t considered about how to work with type on different screens.

If you’re new to working with type, I think you’ll find the book provides a good overview of the issues designers face working digitally and how some of these issues are being solved. It’s a good overview of things you’ll want to learn and explore deeper.

Again if you’re old hat working with type, there will be less learning and more filling in a few gaps of information, and probably gaining some inspiration.

I’ve been thinking if I had read “Type on Screen” before “Thinking with Type” I would have liked the former more. It’s probably the better reading order in terms of the skill level of the reader. If you haven’t read either book, I would suggest reading “Type on Screen” first.

Skim through it at your local bookstore or download a sample from Amazon or iBooks. I think after looking through a few pages, you’ll have a good sense whether or not you’re in the audience for the book.

I also don’t think anyone could really go wrong picking up a copy. Ellen Lupton (and her students) probably know more about type than you and me. “Type on Screen” is likely a better book than I’ve made it out to be as well. It’s a good book that had too many of my expectations to overcome.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday 21 October 2014

The Difficulty Including Creative Work in Productivity Systems Like Getting Things Done (GTD) - Vanseo Design

The Difficulty Including Creative Work in Productivity Systems Like Getting Things Done (GTD) - Vanseo Design

The Difficulty Including Creative Work in Productivity Systems Like Getting Things Done (GTD)

Posted: 20 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Creativity with it’s winding and meandering journeys and productivity with its straight line efficiency don’t always get along. What you do to improve one seems to reduce how well you can complete the other.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about being more productive. First were some thoughts about the importance of focus and then it was an overview of the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system.

title

GTD has helped plenty of people, myself included, get more done and be more productive, however, it’s not a perfect system. It can be difficult to include creative work in a meaningful way that helps you do the work quicker or better.

Today I want to continue this series and talk about the issues I’ve had trying to fit creative work into GTD. In fairness, it’s not just GTD. It’s all productivity systems and the always existing tension between creativity and productivity. The focus will be on the issues. In a couple of weeks I’ll offer some thoughts about how you can still get productivity systems and creativity to play nice together.

Note: If you’re unfamilar with GTD, you should probably read the previous post in this series before reading this one.

Creative Tasks are Hard to Define in Advance

In his book, David Allen talks about vertical and horizontal focus. Vertical focus is about projects with well-defined outcomes and the next actions to reach those outcomes. Horizontal focus is about single (though also well-defined) tasks that we need to be reminded about.

With creative work, the act of creation is often when the task gets defined.

All productivity systems, GTD included, are focused on breaking up larger projects into groups of smaller, actionable, and well-defined tasks. Creativity tends to have more ambiguously defined tasks. That’s the biggest conflict I find between creativity and GTD. It’s not only creative work, though. It’s really anything where tasks are difficult to define.

With creative work, the act of creation is often when the task gets defined. How can you add those tasks to a system when you won’t know what the tasks are until you’re immersed in the creative process?

For example say you’ve started a new design. You’ve talked with the client and understand the problem you’re to solve. You’re ready to develop a concept for the site. How would you break that down into well-defined tasks?

I find that difficult, because I don’t necessarily know where the concept will come from or how I’ll arrive at it. I’m sure some of my time will be spent thinking about it while I stare off at the ceiling. My subconscious will work on it while I’m out shopping for groceries or hanging out with friends one evening.

I’ll probably spend time looking at other websites, magazines, nature, anything for inspiration. I’ll spend some time sketching and some time organizing lists of words and notes and thoughts. The thing is, I don’t know exactly what I’ll do for a given project that will lead me to a concept. I explore different things on different projects. I also have no idea how long I’ll need to do any of these things.

Creative work is more difficult to define down to the task level because the tasks are often found in during the creative process. That ends up leaving creative tasks as something more encompassing than what we typically think of as a task.

For example while writing a book this spring and summer I had tasks like:

  • Make notes
  • Write draft
  • Edit draft

Each of the above would span days or weeks. Tasks tend to be things you can do during a single work day. I could break each of the above up into different chapters or even sections I suppose.

  • Write draft chapter 1
  • Write draft chapter 2
  • Write draft chapter 3

The above isn’t going to help me get a draft written any quicker or better, though. It’s not a necessary reminder while working on the book either. Being focussed and having deadlines were more than enough of a reminder. The tasks become little more than extra stuff to manage.

GTD cuts across a wide list of tasks over different projects. Creativity focuses on a single thing and takes time for exploration. I find I can break creative projects into small subprojects, but it’s more difficult trying define the work down to the task level. I usually end up with something generic like write draft that lasts multiple days or weeks.

With a lot of creative work you simply don’t know what the specific tasks are until you’re in the middle of the work. You can add specific tasks to your system as you explore, but you typically explore as you think of things to explore. Having to stop to think about where to go next lessens the exploration.

Creative work also doesn’t know what specific outcomes it will arrive at. The reason for creative exploration is so you can discover the outcome as well as how to get there in the process of exploring. You can define the outcome generically, but not with the level of specificity GTD wants.

Creativity, Time, and Flow

Time is another issue. I find my work isn’t bound by time so much as guided by it. I need to finish things in a reasonable amount of time, but exact dates usually don’t exist. It’s also difficult to estimate wow long it might take to complete creative tasks. Tasks that required a few hours on one project sometimes require weeks on another.

Another time factor with creative work is the preparation that’s usually required to get into a state of flow. It’s difficult to know how much time that will be prior to each creative session.

What happens when you do find yourself in a state of flow, but the clock says it’s time for another task? You want to keep that flow going as long as possible. It’s irrelevant how much time you schedule to be creative, you want to keep going with it as long as the muse continues to hang around.

This isn’t really a GTD issue as the system doesn’t require deadlines on tasks and projects. GTD would suggest you continue with your creative flow as long as it lasts and the system will be there to help you decide what to do next when your ready for more.

Still you are adding time as one of the criteria for choosing what to work on next. If you can’t reasonably estimate how long your work will take it doesn’t help all that much as a criteria for choosing. Too many of my tasks require far more than an hour or two to complete.

If a creative task is going to take days or weeks, how do you know when it’s time to choose another task to work on? You’re going to work on other tasks while working to complete the one creative task. If that’s the case, why do you need to add the creative task to the system. You don’t need to be reminded about it and your decisions about when to work on it and when to stop will have nothing to do with the system.

Closing Thoughts

There’s a tension between productivity and creativity that’s evident when you try to complete creative work more productively. Any system to help you manage tasks is going run into some difficulty when the work to be managed is creative.

Most of the difficulty revolves around trying to define creative tasks and add criteria to help you decide when to work on them. Creativity resists this kind of definition making it more challenging to include in a task management system.

Time is another factor that leads to issues. Creative work often requires prep time and you don’t want to end creative or productive flows when they happen.

I’ll pick this up again next week and share how I work with GTD in general using the application Things. I’ll close the series the following week with thoughts about how I specifically tweak Things and GTD to overcome the challenges of including creative work in my productivity system.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday 17 October 2014

If You Think You Can… - Vanseo Design

If You Think You Can… - Vanseo Design

If You Think You Can…

Posted: 16 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t—you’re right
—Henry Ford


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The quote above may be Henry Ford’s, but it’s not an original idea. The idea is expressed in the opening verses of the Dhammapada.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with out thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.

It’s the idea that your belief and attitude determine so much about how events unfold for you. They help create context and affect how you perceive and react to everything that happens.

A Positive Attitude in the Face of the Unknown

When you think about it, no one has all the answers. There’s far too much we don’t know, aren’t likely to know any time soon, and think we know, but are probably wrong.

Some things are beyond our current ability to know. Maybe we can’t measure them or they’re too complex and dependent on so many different things. No matter how much we might try, we can’t predict their results. Sometimes despite our inability to reasonably decide what will happen we need to base another decision on what we think will happen. How can you make those decisions?

I’ve seen people frozen and unable to decide on anything when they have to choose based on something they can’t know. It used to be me and it led me to let things happen instead of deciding how they should happen and working toward them happening.

In many of these situations you can choose to believe in either a positive or negative outcome. Your choice comes from your mental models and your worldview about humanity and the universe.

I find when thinking and deciding about the unknown, it’s up to you to assume that unknowable outcome. You can be optimistic or pessimistic of what’s happening or of the results of any actions you might take.

In either case you aren’t really going to change the reality of the unknowable thing, however you will markedly change your attitude about it and how you react to it. Your reaction leads to someone reacting to you and then you react to them. Your initial assumptions greatly impact all that follows.

Your perception sets a context, which results in different actions and reactions. Those differences could lead to entirely different worlds and choices unfolding in front of you. All based on your assumption about something unknowable.

Your assumption becomes something of a self-fulling prophecy (good or bad). I think understanding this is very powerful, because it means you can choose to perceive things in a way that assumes a favorable outcome and increase the probability of that outcome as you do. You can shape your world by imagining the shape you want it to be.

Three Stories About Perception Affecting Reality

I don’t always have the words to discuss this topic the way I want. I struggle to express this idea so I thought I’d try sharing a few stories to see if they help.

Story One: My Grades in College

For much of my college career, I wasn’t all that interested in my grades, but for a brief time toward the end I did want to get good grades.

The first day of class was the usual handing out a syllabus and listening to the teacher tell us about the class and the mechanics of testing and grading. I’d listen and think about what grade I thought I could get if I worked hard and did what you were supposed to do to get good grades.

Most of the time that would be an A, but if a class seemed more difficult I might think I’d have to work harder just to get a B.

A funny thing would happen. No matter how hard I worked in those B classes, and despite any extra work I did, I could never pull the grade up to an A. I had set a limit on the first day.

One semester I stopped doing that and just told myself I could get an A in everything. Guess what my grade point average was that semester? Yep. 4.0, an A in every class. All it took was believing in advance I could and I was able to earn the grade I wanted without any extra work beyond what I had already been doing.

I changed my expectation to the result I wanted allowing me to achieve it.

Story Two: Using Music to Direct My Day

One of the last jobs I had involved sitting behind a computer all day (much like now) and mostly doing a lot of repetitive tasks (unlike now). I worked for a company turning print books into ebooks before most people cared about ebooks.

Like many offices a lot of employees brought a selection of CDs to work. Kids, this is ancient times I’m describing. It’s a time before .mp3 files and streaming online. We actually had to put these physical disks into trays to play them. Frightening, I know. Now get off my lawn.

Anyway I’d bring in music to listen through headphones. My selection varied, but most always I’d start the day listening to Louis Armstrong. I find it hard to be in a bad mood after listening to his music, which is often an expression of joy.

One spring our company saw massive layoffs and about half the hundred people I worked with were let go. I didn’t want to be in a good mood when I went back to work so instead of Louis Armstrong, I listed to Rage Against the Machine. It seemed fitting after a company layoff and it kept me from forgetting my anger with the company.

I changed my day by choosing what music to listen to when starting it.

Story Three: Your Customer’s Experience Begins With a Positive Assumption

Many years ago I worked in what is now a closed chain of bookstores. The store I worked in was located in a very large shopping center on Long Island and every weekend the parking lot was a mad house.

If you worked the late shift on a weekend you had to get to work at least a half hour early to find a spot, if you could find one at all. It wasn’t a fun experience and it was guaranteed to put most anyone in a bad mood.

Customers would come into the store all time in a bad mood. I understood. I know I cut a few of them off to get my parking space and within five minutes found myself serving them inside the store.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked retail, but when customers start talking rudely you have a tendency to respond in kind. It’s the same from the customer side if the employee is the one to start the rudeness.

You can imagine how a lot of the conversations went. The customer would often walk away thinking the employee was an arrogant jackass and the employee walked away thinking similar thoughts about the customer.

One day, realizing the parking lot had a lot to do with a customer’s rudeness, I decided to respond not in kind, but with kindness. I was nice in return to someone being rude to me. From that moment on the conversation took a pleasant turn and it was all from me making the assumption the customer wasn’t an ass, but had just dealt with a parking lot that turned all who entered into asses.

I assumed something positive about someone and turned a negative conversation into a positive one.

Perception and Design

I think most of what determines whether you have a good day or a bad one has to do with your attitude and how you respond to whatever the day throws at you and not the stuff that was thrown at you.

This isn’t just about design. It’s more general life observations. I think I can come up with some design examples, though.

Don’t assume your client is an idiot because he or she doesn’t know everything you know about designing and developing websites. You don’t know as much about their business as they do and you likely don’t know as much about their business as you think you do.

Assume something more positive. Assume the client didn’t know, but is more than capable of knowing. Take some time to explain whatever they didn’t understand and move on.

When it comes to making design decisions you can’t absolutely know what’s the best decision to make at every point in the process. There are too many decision with too many connections to other decisions to know for certain. You still have to make a decision.

Make one and don’t doubt it. Assume it was the best decision you could make. Doubting will only make you doubt other decisions that come after. Be confident and trust your judgement. Assume you chose well unless shown otherwise.

Be open to the possibility you didn’t make a good decision, but assume it was good unless you have evidence otherwise. You’ll be more productive that way. If a decision is nagging at you then by all means revisit it, but don’t let not knowing keep you from making other decisions.

Do you feel overwhelmed with all there is to know and learn about designing websites? With so much in front of you it might be difficult to get started. Just assume you’ll learn what you need and want to know as long as you try and then learn something. Make the assumption that leads to your preferred outcome.

Closing Thoughts

There are many times in design or life when you don’t know enough to make a decision, but you do need to make a decision to continue. In these cases just assume a direction or option or outcome to keep you moving.

It makes no difference what you assume to the thing you make the assumption about. However, if you can remain confident in your decision, it will lead all your thoughts, decisions, and actions that follow. They’ll be different because they’re based on your assumption.

It sets a context for taking action and making choices. Even though I’ve used the word positive a few times, I know it’s not the right word. I’m not trying to suggest you should always assume sunshine and butterflies. You shouldn’t walk around naive and assume everything is wonderful.

Be prepared for the worst. Know a worst case is possible and have a plan should it occur. Otherwise assume the more positive possibility. Assume the option more aligned with what you want the outcome to be.

You’ll get more done that way. You’ll be productive and seeing the world in a more positive light will help make it a better place. It makes you want to improve because you’re hopeful instead of hopeless about taking action.

Again, I’m not quite sure I expressed myself as well as I wanted, but hopefully something in there makes sense.

I can’t guarantee that just because you think you can do something that you will eventually do it. I can guarantee if you don’t believe you can, you won’t.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday 14 October 2014

Getting Things Done (GTD)—An Overview Of The System - Vanseo Design

Getting Things Done (GTD)—An Overview Of The System - Vanseo Design

Getting Things Done (GTD)—An Overview Of The System

Posted: 13 Oct 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Every year I set a goal to become more productive, which for me usually means looking over my current task management system, observing what I’m doing well and what I need to improve.

To Do

Typically the time for this evaluation is the end of one year and the start of the next, though I’ll sometimes do this in between large projects when I need to refocus myself. Now is one of those times.

Last week I talked about the importance of focus and I mentioned that I would continue and talk about the productivity system I use. Over the next few weeks, I’ll also talk about where productivity systems sometimes fail when it comes to creative work and how I manage to make the two work together for me.

Finding a Productivity System

Over the years I’ve tried several methods to organize my work and remind myself what I need to do. At first it was a simple list of things I thought I’d forget. Unfortunately that doesn’t scale well and sadly it didn’t always work to get me to do what was on the list either.

GTD can help you determine what to do next at any point in time, but you still have to do it.

I read a handful of productivity books, though none seemed to work for me. For a time I tried scheduling a calendar each week, which helped to a degree, but as most of my work isn’t time sensitive, I found myself spending too much time rearranging unfinished items on my calendar. It was a lot of guessing what I would do on a given day only to have reschedule things again and again.

Eventually I read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. It’s not a perfect system for me, which I’ll explain later, but I do like the logic behind the system. It made sense to me.

If you’re looking to implement a system I recommend giving the book a read. Even if you decide not to use GTD, I think you’ll find something in the book to help make you more productive. The rest of this post is an overview of GTD, but again I’d recommend reading the book to understand how to use the system.

The Getting Things Done (GTD) Process

It takes a lot of mental energy to try to remember everything you have to do. Every task undone is an open loop. By getting things out of your head and into a trusted system you close these loops and can focus more on the things you have to do.

GTD defines three different types of activity

  • Doing work as it shows up—When you have or want to do something right away.
  • Doing predefined work—Choosing what to work on next based on your system.
  • Defining your work—The process of entering everything into your system.

Productivity systems focus on the latter two activities. Each teaches how to enter to do items into the system and then find them later so you can do the work.

GTD has a four step process to get things out of your head and into a system you can trust to not let you forget.

  1. Collect
  2. Process
  3. Organize
  4. Review

Naturally somewhere in this process is the actual doing of tasks. It wouldn’t be much of a productivity system if you never did anything. The steps above are to help you determine what to do next at any point in time, but you still have to do it. No productivity system does the work for you.

Collect—This step is to get everything out of your head and store it all in one location for processing. You can collect ideas, questions, reference material, emails, etc. You might initially collect these things in different buckets, but they should all funnel into one central location for processing.

Process—This step is to decide what to do with all the things you’ve collected. GTD provides a workflow flowchart (PDF) to follow. First you ask yourself a couple of questions about the item you’re processing.

  • What is it?
  • Is it actionable?

If it’s not actionable then trash it, save it for someday, or save it as reference material. Eliminate, incubate, or file.

If it is actionable you want to turn it into a task or a project. If it’ll take less than a couple of minutes just do it. For projects you’ll do some planning, which involves creating as many actionable tasks as needed to complete the project.

At the single task level you decide if the task is for you or someone else. If it’s for someone make sure they know and then let them do the work. If it’s for you it needs to be organized into your system.

Organize—There are a number of decisions to make when organizing tasks. Is a to do item part of an existing project or is it a one off task? If it’s a project where does the task belong. Is it something that can only be done before or after another task (series) or can it be done at any time (parallel).

Is it time sensitive? Does it need to be finished or started by a specific date? If so it should be added to your calendar, but only time sensitive tasks should ever appear on your calendar.

There are also a handful of criteria you’ll associate with each task and project. I’ll get to these in the next section.

Review—At regular intervals you want to review what you have in your system. It could be a quick daily review to process your in-basket. It could be a weekly review that helps you see what you’ve done and reorganize what’s left to do. It could also be a monthly or semi-annual review that considers your tasks and projects from a higher view.

GTD offers a six-level model for reviews

  • 50,000+ feet: Life
  • 40,000 feet: 3 – 5 year vision
  • 30,000 feet: 1 – 2 year goals
  • 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
  • 10,000 feet: Current projects
  • Runway: Current actions

A daily review might only look at current actions and projects. A weekly review will include areas of responsibility (For me that’s mainly my clients, including myself) The monthly or semi-annual review will look at short and long term goals.

Four Criteria for What to do Next

You decide what to work on next based on four criteria, which act as constraints to filter your tasks and present only those that are possible options for what you can work on next.

  1. Context—Some tasks require a physical location to complete. Errands for example. Some might require a phone or the internet. Unless your context, your current situation and available tools match what’s required for a task, it doesn’t make sense to see that task as something to do.
  2. Time available—If you only have 15 minutes free before a meeting then you only need to be presented with tasks you can complete in 15 minutes or less.
  3. Energy available—Your mental energy for work varies. You might not be up for a task before you’ve had your morning coffee or maybe you find yourself low on energy after lunch.
  4. Priority—Some tasks and projects are more important to complete than others.

When processing tasks you would add the above criteria to each task as you organize them into projects or single to do items. One task might require a code editor, a half hour of time, and a medium amount of mental energy. Another might only require a browser, 15 minutes to complete, and little energy.

When Tuesday afternoon rolls around and you’re feeling low on energy, but want to be productive with the last couple of hours of the day, you can call up your tasks that don’t require much energy and can be completed within a two-hour time span. You can pick from those items based on their priority and what you’re capable of doing with the tools at hand.

Closing Thoughts

That’s an admittedly quick overview of GTD. You want to get stuff out of your head so you can close open loops. You get them out of your head by adding them to a trusted system of collect, process, organize, and review.

There are more details for how to organize your tasks beyond setting them in series or parallel, placing them in projects, and adding different criteria to them, but hopefully you get the general idea.

From the moment I started using the system. I’ve been able to better determine what to work on and when, which ultimately helps me get more done. It takes some time to get used to the system and practice using it, which is why daily, weekly, and monthly reviews are so important. It’s also why I reevaluate my use of the system every year and make changes to improve it.

There’s one downside I’ve found to the system and that’s getting it to play nice with creative work or any work that is difficult to break down into well-defined tasks. That’s something I’ll talk about next week.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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