The Graphic Mac

Being a designer requires more knowledge, experience and dedication than ever. Gone are the days of “specializing” in one area of design or the other; you have to work in print, Web and multi-media – all demanding more of your valuable time. Freelancers in particular generally have enough work to fill their day without figuring in time for distractions. I spent the last nine months freelancing, and was lucky enough to have enough work to fill my day. I was also spending some of my time each day searching for a full-time gig, so my time had to be managed well. It took a while, but I found a decent balance after about a month of trying different things. Below are a few of those things that gave me more time to focus on my design and writing, job searching, and even a bit of time for me to sit back and relax a little each day, go for a bike ride, or leisurely surf the Web. Read on to see what worked for me.

GTD (Getting Things Done) Gets Nothing Done:

GTD apps are a joke. I personally believe that people who uses anything more than a simple calendar are just fooling themselves. GTD apps are almost a big a time-suck as social networking. You end up spending more time trying to organize your day that you find yourself with little time left to actually GET THINGS DONE.

Just do things as they come along. If you can’t do something in under five or ten minutes, put it in a pile to do later. Simple. Don’t complicate things by trying to organize, categorize and prioritize. It’s just a waste of time.

Close Your Email App:

The idea that you must read and reply to email immediately upon receiving it is ridiculous. In fact, the idea that you even need to know you got the email immediately is completely confusing to me. If something is so critical that it requires immediate response, I would hope your client would have called on the phone. Set aside some time each day to check email. Perhaps 15 minutes in the morning, another 15 in the afternoon, and a half an hour or so in the evening to respond to emails that weren’t urgent during the day. Categorizing your email as urgent or not will help you in keeping to the email schedule. I saved nearly an hour per day just by limiting how much time I spent emailing.

Social Networking Sucks The Life Out Of You:

I had the benefit of social networking being a part of the process in making a living the last several months. But Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Flickr, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn have a way of turning into a time-suck very quickly unless you’re extremely disciplined. I’ll let you in on a secret. There’s nothing on any of the social networks that requires your attention. Period. Put off social networking until after your work is done. If you’re too attached to go six or eight hours without it, at least make an effort to narrow your networks down to one or two. Like email, set specific times of the day and amounts of time to dedicate to it. When your time is up, shut them down and get back to work. Social networking can be a valuable tool, but it can absolutely suck the life out of you if you let it. Trust me when I say your life won’t end if you lose a few followers because of it. In fact, you probably won’t miss them anyway.

Web Browsing Kills:

It’s unrealistic to say don’t open your Web browser. So much of a designer’s tools are found on the Web nowadays. Between stock photo sites, vendor contacts, and research, we just can’t avoid using a browser. But having that Web browser open just invites distraction. Especially if you use Firefox, where you can integrate Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and other social networks right into the browser via add-ons. If the temptation is too much, try downloading and using a separate browser for work. I used Safari during the day because there’s little you can do to add features that lead to distractions. I had nothing but client sites, resources such as stock photo sites, and vendor sites bookmarked. By keeping work and play separate, it made it easy to not lose valuable time seeing what sites are getting hammered on Digg, or what some guy I went to high school with is doing this weekend on Facebook. I never really liked the guy anyway. Though RSS feeds are handy, I avoided launching my RSS reader as well. It eventually leads to browsing, then sharing on Twitter… Then calling my client to apologize for missing a deadline. Save RSS for after your work is done. You’ll probably find that most of the articles weren’t worth reading anyway.

Accept The Deadline And The Results:

Deadlines are a fact of life. I’ve never met a designer who thought he or she had enough time to design a brochure or Web site. Art Directors and designers who complain about timelines are dolts, if you ask me. If the client needs something in two days, then give them two days of work. Period. Wasting hours complaining about it, trying to get more time or waffling over a design that is 80% complete is a waste of time. Learn to concept quickly. I’m not saying that you should use the first idea you come up with, but designers that waste half their available time just to come up with “the perfect concept” are foolish. Freelancers in particular simply don’t have this luxury. Trust your ideas. If you can come up with three ideas, chances are that at least one of them can used. Use your time to improve and add to the chosen concept’s design. Save yourself an hour or so before a project is due to look over your work for any quick improvements you can make, but accept your design as it is. If you’re not happy with your design, chances are your client won’t be either. In short, stop second-guessing yourself and get to work!

Know your software:

If you’re going to spend time reading, try reading something that will improve your knowledge of the software you use. Learning keyboard shortcuts, various techniques and aspects of InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash can save you hours of valuable time. That time can then be spent concepting and designing, rather than mundane tasks like manually lining up photos next to text blocks every time the text reflows rather than anchoring the photos to the text to begin with. These are just some of the things I found to work for me. Obviously your mileage may vary. But I can assure you that if you make an honest effort to evaluate your habits, you WILL find at least an hour or more a day worth of wasted time. And that’s time you could spend billing your client and improving the quality of your work. I might add that keeping a clean desktop, both digital and your real desk, can make a HUGE difference!