Monsters, mess-management, and music: How I get things done

At SXSW, I attended a session on “Design Workflows at Work,” where a panel of designers talked about how they get work done on a typical day. The session itself was just okay, but perhaps a little too informal and spontaneous, however, as part of the session, the panelists built a fantastic site about the topic. The most interesting feature of the site was a series of interviews with about two dozen top designers — guys as different as Cameron Moll and Khoi Vinh — where they answer the a set of common questions about day-to-day design workflow in a professional environment. Fascinating stuff. Some can’t work without music, some can’t with any music on at all. Some need privacy and quiet, others need a busy, collaborative environment. Lots of interesting approaches to coming up with creative ideas and getting things done.

Anyway, I highly recommend the site and the interviews. Meanwhile, somehow the panel organizers forgot to include your favorite friendly-neighborhood poker-playin’, mashup makin’, dog-walking designer. No worries. Here’s the “missing” Matt P answers to the “Design Workflows” questionnaire:

What are some things you do to help yourself into the state of mind necessary for creative work?
I need three things: a clean, tidy desk (random clutter really distracts me), some music (generally uptempo stuff like trance, club music, or film scores), and something to drink. I don’t smoke, so the drink gives me something to fiddle with when I’m thinking.

Do you follow a strict daily (or weekly, etc.) routine with regard to workflow, or is every day (or week) different?
I’m not very good with keeping a strict routine, but I generally try to tackle email, small design tasks, and relatively simple stuff at the start of the day, then focus on the bigger-picture items the rest of the day. Of course, deadlines and panicky people don’t always allow me the luxury of keeping to this routine.

Do you prefer to work in a closed, private environment free from other people and distractions, or in a more open, collaborative environment?
I’m kind of like Shrek. I vastly prefer to work alone, in my own quiet spot. I find the whole concept of an “open, collaborative environment” in the workplace to be an excuse for a lack of sufficient office space. I find it much harder to focus on a big project, especially one that demands creativity, with lots of other conversations, interruptions, and distractions. Collaboration is great, even essential, in creating most good design work, but working in a noisy, crowded workspace isn’t the same thing. I’m a bit of an introvert, too, so I tend to get a lot more done in quiet, private space than in an open workspace where there’s so much more traffic and interaction with other people.

What do you do to get your day(s) started in the right direction?
It’s hard for me to just sit down and be creative. I tend to work better at night, so for me it’s not as natural to have good, original, or creative ideas first thing in the morning. I like to have some “wake up” time before starting a day — walking the dog, listening to an uptempo playlist on my ipod, reading the newspaper, watching TV — letting my senses react to things that have nothing to do with design or work. By the time I get to my desk in the morning, my brain should be warmed up and buzzing with lots of other stimuli.

More importantly than all that, I also start almost every day with a cold blue Lo-Carb Monster. Coffee is lame.

What task management technique do you use?
I keep a to-do list in Basecamp. Each morning I update it, print it out, then highlight the priority items for that day. Sounds good, but I find that the less-urgent items on that list languish for long stretches at a time. Balancing short-term rush projects with long-term big-picture projects is always a challenging balancing act. With high hopes of establishing a more efficient task-management system, I’m reading Getting Things Done and Lifehacker right now.

What things tend to disrupt your workflow?
The usual suspects: non-essential emails, random office pop-ins, espn.com, other people’s phone calls and conversations, IM’s from co-workers. I also have to fight off my urge to check news sites and catch up on what’s going on in the world. As an information junkie, as well as a news, politics, and pop culture geek, it’s hard to fight the urge to check the latest headlines every hour.

What previous experiences have influenced your workflow?
Sometimes I’ve worked like hell on a project for months, and it ultimately got killed. Other times, I have spent two hours on something that I wasn’t totally sold on, but that other people loved and re-used in dozens of different ways. The lesson I’ve learned from this is that the quality and impact of a design isn’t always correlated with the total time you put into it. So often when it comes to design, you have to do the best you can on a project within a limited timeframe and budget and live with it. I’ve never finished a project and thought it was "perfect." But more often than not, I’ve worked on something to the point where I can feel generally positive about it and say "hey, that’s pretty good." Usually, when I get to that point, it’s time to shift focus to the next thing.

What other disciplines influence the way you work?
As a writer, I learned early on the value of being clear and concise, and the importance of stripping away nonessential junk. My high school journalism instructor relentlessly crossed out needless words in my writing. She eliminated almost every adverb I used. She hammered into me the concept that more isn’t better. I apply a lot of that to my approach with design. I hate graphics or visuals that exist only as ornaments. Every element of a design should be meaningful in some way and should help communicate information. If it doesn’t, why is it part of the design?

Is there anyone in particular you have learned from?
I’ve probably been influenced by more designers than I can possibly remember. I always notice great magazine ads, cool movie posters, clever TV spots, or an interesting logo. But as far as specific influences go, early on, I learned a lot from the work of designer Robin Williams. I learned half of what I know about Flash from the gurus over at Kirupa.com. More recently, I’ve been deeply in debt to the work of Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, Charles Wyke-Smith, and Andy Clarke, whose books really helped open my eyes to the possibilities of CSS web design. Someday, I hope someone can say they learned a lot from some of the things I designed or wrote.

What things help keep you focused on the work at hand?
A strong, deep, irrational idea that I’m fooling everyone and need to prove myself all over again with my next project.