Well, no productivity article is complete without mentioning the Pomodoro technique. But if it works, it works, so I couldn’t get myself to skip it. I can’t really say that I Pomodoro my whole day, yet I find it a great tool when things get out of hand. I set my timer to 25 minutes and promise myself that I won’t let myself get interrupted in this time.

Sometimes I would just get lost in a productive session and completely ignore my timer, though I believe -if you can- taking a break between your Pomodoro sessions is for the best. For me this works more as a good way to kickstart a productive design session.

Write things down on actual paper

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I tried many different productivity apps, to-do lists, calendars, task management tools etc. but for me, nothing beats the good old pen & paper. I find that having a pen in my hand to doodle stuff allows me to organize my mind better and get things done way faster. It basically allows you to visualize what goes on in your mind, which also makes up extra space in your mind by putting some of the things on paper and forgetting about them for a while.

I like to keep one “to-do” column and one “done” column on paper. First of all these are not something to be shared with anyone else, I write these only for myself. And the second thing is, I create these columns per day. So I would have an overview of each day by just looking at these and seeing what I did the day before also helps me plan my day.

The to-do column keeps the various things that pop into my mind as I am working on something else. It could be a new task/request I receive while I am focused on another task, an issue that I discover with the product while looking for something else or just something random that needs my attention. I just jot them down on the to-do column instead of creating tasks on the Trello board. A task on the Trello board is expected to be properly defined and clearly explained as it is shared among the team. But most of these things that pop up usually don’t ever end up in the board. And if there are things that should go to the board, I take my time to write it down properly. If I try to do that while I am focused on another task, it would just kill my productivity and I would lose my context.

The done column is for smaller things and miscellaneous stuff that I complete within a day. I like to keep a history of what I did each day which can be useful in many scenarios and putting every small thing in the Trello board creates a lot of noise, so I keep the small bits written on paper. I also put down a high level view of what I did that day which I use in the daily stand up.

Do not rely on your memory when working on many different things. Trying to keep something in your memory would take away from your focus and would make the mental effort much higher for you.

Divide and Conquer

By the nature of product design, the tasks you have are usually very ambiguous and generic. It is part of the job to determine what smaller tasks needs to be done to achieve the greater goal. Thus, the first thing I do when I have a new task is to split that into smaller, more manageable and ideally independent tasks.

I find it quite important to have independent tasks for two main benefits. First it is very common that a particular task gets blocked due to a pending decision, lack of inspiration or a technical reason. Having independent tasks assure you that you can always continue working on the other tasks without getting affected by the blocker.

The second benefit is that as the tasks don’t rely on each other, if need be, another designer can jump on one of the tasks to speed up the delivery of the bigger task.

Having small tasks reduce the cost of context switching. What I like to do is to have a couple of bullet points in the Trello card of the task I am working at and whenever I finish one of those points, I write down a quick note of the current state of my work. Think of it like checkpoints in a game. If I get interrupted by someone/something and lose my context, in the worst case I can pick it up from the last checkpoint which reduces the impact of the context switch a lot.

Prioritize

This is probably the most important thing in this list. Every single task on your list is probably very important, but when everything is “very important” then actually nothing is important. So, take some time and figure out a priority order for your tasks. Of course this order can change as you keep working on things, but having a concrete list of prioritized tasks would allow you to focus on the most important thing without worrying about what you’ve left behind.

It might take some time to get good at prioritizing your tasks, I can also share my tips regarding that but this article is already quite long, so let me know if you would like to read about it in another article.

In any case, keep in mind that having a badly prioritized list is better than having no prioritization at all.

Know when you are stuck

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Designing for software consists of very complex tasks and it could be that you run out of ideas in the middle of a task or you are blocked by some higher level decision, some resource from another designer or a technical input from one of the developers. Whichever is the case, knowing when to stop working on a task is very important.

Sometimes context switch might actually be what you want. Spending hours on one task without good progress is as draining as switching between many different tasks. Try to identify when you get stuck and cannot progress anymore. You can try to give yourself a fixed amount of time and see if you can recover, if not, simply switch to another task. Your brain will keep processing the information in the background and you might find that you are much closer to the solution once you get back to it.

Conclusion

Keeping your productivity high is quite challenging and it requires an understanding of your own working habits. It takes time and experimentation to find a good balance, but as you keep working on it the satisfaction of getting more work done at the end of the day is completely worth it.

Let me know how you manage your tasks and improve your own productivity in the comments!