Mindful Ways of Working

In these past two years, I've been focusing more on self-experimentation, slowly forming opinions, and documenting behaviors and practices that optimize one's time for focused work and prevent anxiety-driven behaviors. These practices have helped me avoid burnout, and they keep adding to my ability to be a resilient human and designer.

I'm a big believer in experimenting, so this is not a recipe book. It is an invitation to experiment, and that ultimately you should test, reflect and adapt it to your needs.

1. Energy Mapping

One of the pieces behind high-impact and fulfilling work is how one sequences tasks during the day. Even though we are not battery-powered machines, everything we do either removes or adds to our available mental energy.

Energy mapping may help you unlock a better sequence of different tasks on your workdays, maximizing your creative energy and helping you understand topics and activities that bring you the most energy and joy.

When you search for energy mapping examples on the internet, you'll find many different approaches and levels of complexity. I think about it as another form of journaling — writing down observations based on one's experience and adding structure and complexity, only if needed. What I offer here is a simple approach that has served me well in the past years.

Template

• Situation — This can be a task, a project, a meeting, etc. A few words should be enough to describe it.
• Sentiment — What have you noticed after the fact? It can be binary like positive or negative, like, dislike, or levels from -5 to +5. This should be your instinct or gut feeling evaluation about the situation. No need to overthink it.
• Comments — A brief reflection on the reasons you perceived this situation as a positive or negative one. It can also be an opportunity to reflect on who was with you and if that impacts the sentiment.

The initial evaluation may take up to a month, depending on how diverse and intense your workdays are. I suggest starting to catalog at least a week of work and then going back to it at least once a year to understand the changes.

Note: You should aim to write each item without using too much of your thinking mind. It shouldn't feel like a performance evaluation. It is a personal tool to get to know more about yourself.

Benefits:

Time is our most valuable resource, and getting a better grasp of what removes or adds to your available energy will directly impact making your work fulfilling. In my experience, it is also an excellent tool for preventing burnout and building resilience.

2. Put it on the calendar

This one is probably already familiar to you, as it is a common productivity tool, but perhaps I can still offer a different perspective on it. If anything, putting it in the calendar can be a practical realization of energy mapping.

The goal is to intentionally sequence your time to afford you bigger chunks of time for deep work while grouping other smaller tasks.

Based on your role and goals that you plan to achieve in a month, quarter, or half, intentionally plan your week using your calendar tool of choice. When I think about my time, I consider four segments:

• Deep Work — What Deep work means is outside of the scope of this writing, but a way to look at it is by having the required focused time to achieve a higher-level order of thinking. It is, in my view, a better way of navigating through complex and ambiguous problems. This should be work that puts you in the zone, unlock your creativity, and make you feel accomplished in the end.
• Breaks — We all need more breaks, and it is essential to plan for that. In a world where everyone is trying to get one's attention, it is necessary to take a step back and focus on ourselves. This is more personal, and I believe it is important to define what is a must-have for you. To me is having a proper lunchtime where I disconnect from work and focus on my meal and my family for a moment.
• Execution and Admin Work — These are the tasks you have 80% or more confidence that you can execute. These should also be flexible, allowing you to group and sequence them together.
• Meetings — These are generally harder to move because they impact others, requiring additional coordination. You and your working team must get together and decide on time allocation and sequencing of fixed meetings that benefit most folks on the team.

👉 Check an example.

Benefits:

This may look similar to having a to-do list, but in my experience, it does provide some extra benefits:

• Easy access — Meetings bound our work-life, and we're often relying on the calendar. It is a surface of high discoverability, providing a consistent re-engagement with what's next.
• Accountability — This practice is usually helpful in making one accountable for spending time on what was planned. That's in part because it may feel like an "official" appointment or meeting.
• Better Estimations — When you use your calendar as a source of to-do's, you develop a better sense of time estimation, which can be valuable for a designer's career.

3. Write in the Zen Mode

A few months ago, I saw a post by Mike Crittenden that said, "The average person should write 5x more things than they do. The average written thing should be 5x shorter than it is." It resonated with me, and it connects back to one of my posts where I highlighted some tips to write more efficiently, which I believe to be a fundamental skill for distributed or hybrid teams to collaborate.

Today, I want to offer an effortless practice that will help your written communication to be less reactive and more concise: write outside of the context of your communication.

Use your software of choice and write thoughts and answers separate from where you usually post them (in our case probably workplace chat/posts or google documents). Then copy and paste to where you need to send them.

Any software will do, but you can optimize for those who support basic grammar correction and formating like: Notion, Apple Notes, Google Docs, Text Edit, Grammarly.

While I don't believe this should be used for 100% of your communication, I think we could all benefit from a bit more reflection, structure, and grammar checks before sending out paragraphs to the internet.

Benefits:

• Reduce reactive communication — Context switching, in this case, provides an beneficial opportunity to detach from who has sent the message or made the comment, resulting in writing that carries less reactive emotions.
• Arguments win debates — We often need to discuss different points of view with XFN partners. This practice may offer an opportunity to break down and better analyze counter-arguments, positively impacting the quality of your discourse.
• Customize your context — When you have more control of the context (the software where you write), you can optimize for larger and legible typography, which helps you write more with less density, more clarity and proper structure.