You may or may not know this, but I’m a terrible wannabe overachiever.
When I start working on a project, I don’t just want it to succeed, I want it to be the best. I have visions of extended A+ reviews from fellow web designers and enthusiastic phone calls from clients, analytics pages that go really over the top and thousands millions of happy users.
Of course, all this fantasy gets me in trouble more often than not. I bet you know why: creative procrastination.
What does it mean, in a nutshell? I’ll visualize it for you: me, staring at the screen, pen & paper in hand, designing in my mind, laying out HTML snippets, styling with CSS, solving complex design problems, conducting usability reports and studying ROI analyses.
All. In. My. Head.
That’s a bit too much, as you know. It usually means that by the time I lay down a single line of CSS I’m so tired and confused it’s not even fun anymore. But I love my work, so it should be fun right? Right. That’s why you just need to keep going.
Every time you stumble upon a web design roadblock and lose two minutes of your precious time thinking of how to overcome it, stop and run in the opposite direction, immediately.
If you’re pondering too much over a design problem, do a bit of brain-dead form coding. If you’re totally bored of coding HTML, stop and sprinkle a bit of CSS magic to your project. If you feel confined in your browser window, fire up Photoshop and start designing out of the box. Most important: never stop working on your project. Less thought, more work.
I guarantee, a moment’s gonna come that your project will just look at you, shiny, finished, and you’ll marvel at how streamlined your process was this time.
“But, Sug, what about the correct way of web designing?”, I hear you thinking. As with most design workflows, there is really no spoon. No panacea, no proper way of doing stuff. Hell, I always say “HTML first, CSS second” yet I always start coding CSS as soon as I get a vague idea of the site. Nasty, nasty Sug.
Learn your way of working and try to live with it. Don’t fret over the little things, they will eventually get ironed out before launch, promise.
Just don’t stop working.
If you’re one of the few people that grace my Adium contact list pretending to be away, you should have observed it so far: I gave up on IM. I just had to.
It wasn’t that hard, I just stopped using this means of communication. Nowadays, I mainly use Twitter and e-mail to get in touch with people, the former more so than the latter. OK, I do use IM, but just for intranet purposes at work, using our homemade Pathfinder Instant Messenger. And that’s about it.
Why, I can hear you ask. I’ll tell you why. Because it’s so damn time-consuming I couldn’t do anything with Adium in the background anymore. It was the feeling that I cheated on people and made them feel bad when I wasn’t promptly replying to their messages. That’s why I found Twitter so liberating: noone expects you to be there and reply to every given moment. Well, noone should anyway.
So at first was productivity. I found myself more productive and efficient while at home. I wrote more, designed more and learned more. I learned to manage Twitter distractions and incorporate it in my workflow without serious drawbacks. And everything was fine for a while.
But I lacked something, and that was real-time human communication. And for that, I decided to take my Friday (traditionally at home) nights on IM. Just to keep in touch with friends and add to the overall relaxing feeling. Some light gossip, some link exchanging and that’s it. You give a little but you gain a sense of social satisfaction.
So I was wondering, am I the only one that declared IM bankruptcy? Surely there are more of you that just stopped using it at some point.
Do you still keep tabs on IM friends by logging in every once in a while? Or you just use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with people?
Do share your opinions in the comments.
I blame my university years for my procrastination curse.
Not that anything (much) was wrong with my academic studies, but the whole mentality of (greek) university oozes procrastination: most of the time, there’s not an everyday reason for you to do stuff. There were projects and exercises, yes, but those could be easily (?) tackled the last two or three days of the deadline. Or not.
Since I’m trying hard to face this aspect of myself, I’ve given a chance to time tracking software. I found that I focus more easily on a task if there’s a visible timer around the screen, ticking away, measuring my attention time. Believe it or not!
My first try was something in the lines of Billings and On The Job for Mac OS X. They’re clearly an overkill since I don’t use the invoicing features for my personal projects (or maybe I should) but I like the fact that I can set timers for tasks and group them into projects. But I’m still on the lookout for a better, more effective, less bloated solution.
So my questions are: Do you use some kind of time tracking device or application? Is it online or offline? Digital or analog?
Do share your experience in the comments.
