Squared Eye Notebook

Buckle down. Knuckle up! Getting back on schedule.

Okay, no more joking around. I’m nearly six months into working on a product and its time to tighten the belt. Why? Because I’ve become fat. Somewhere in the transition from service to product design I forgot all the best things I learned about efficiency and productivity. I went off track because working on a new product is fast paced crazy town and my normal process was out the window.

Thankfully Jamin Jantz (our Project Manager) and the leads on our Product Team have been working on refining our process, and its inspired me to think about my daily personal process again. So here goes. This is what I’m going to try:

Personal Daily Process

The day before Every good day starts with knowing what I need to do the day before. We’ve started trying out Flow App from the folks at Meta Lab for our product design team, and it will help me know what I need to accomplish for the current day and the day ahead.

Old Man Schedule With a 10 week old baby and posting to Tumblr at 3am after a bottle feeding, the OMS is right out, but don’t worry, it’ll be back soon, and a few times a week I manage to be up at 6am and off to the gym to start the day.

8:30am start with a plan I will come into the office and make my double coffee on our super fancy CoWork espresso machine, and promptly sit down and work for one hour on an interface or any other product design task that requires productivity. NO Email. NO Twitter. NO RSS. NO design surfing.

9:30am cut off the head of the dragon You have to answer email sometime, and there may be important things you need to check on from the day before or night before if you work at Zaarly. Email is endless though, and so I’ll only do this for 30 minutes.

10:00am Mandatory fraternization with the natives Tweet, micro blog, chat, say bad words, watch Charlie the Unicorn again, and get a drink of water. Oh, and get my butt outside for a quick walk.

10:00 - 12:00am Pomodoro style spurts of productive digital work and Creative Direction. The great thing about working on the East Coast when so much of your team is in San Fransisco on the West Coast is that you have over three hours till they start asking for your attention.

12:00pm Take a real break I don’t love lunch like I love other meals, but I’m realizing again that I need to take a real lunch. Maybe I need to just go have a real sit down and a lunch coversation in our CoWork Greenville kitchen?

1:00pm - 5:00pm Creative Direct, Meetings, and Work I’m not going to be able to schedule my whole day. I know that now, but I might be able to schedule a portion of it, and then make the latter half of the day a reasonably scheduled stock of work. I need to set an email timer for 2 times for 30 minutes during this period. Anymore is insane it will eat me alive. I get 150+ emails a day, and that doesn’t count the type site email newsletters!

9:30pm Nighty Night I will keep going to bed at a reasonable hour or none of this will work. Also, I promise not to blog about any of this kind of thing at 3:00am anymore, I should have just gone to bed after Lucy drank her bottle, but I had too many ideas on the brain.

With that. Goodnight!