Filling every minute of my life with activity or media begins to feel a bit mindless and automatic, and that goes directly against what it means to be a good designer imo. We’re meant to be swift, but also thoughtful, informed, but also curious. It’s nothing new, but something I’ve learned that can break the noise and the autonomy for myself is to set aside time to think and to record my thoughts. I use these times to journal about a challenge or a question and to dive deeper on it. Ultimately it’s to understand better through thinking and documenting concise, coherent records of my thoughts, ideas and questions.

That’s why i think designers should write more. It’s to work that big muscle up there in our heads. It’s to exercise our ability to go deep, quickly on new challenges that we’re regularly expected to approach in our profession.

In a time where things are changing so fast, where you need to think on your feet quite a bit, it becomes difficult not to just get dragged along by all of the new products, features and cool twitter posts. It happens in the work place as well: when there are so many projects going on, and so many people reaching out, it’s tempting to just give shallow, instinctive answers at times because of the hurriedness that being part of a product team demands. But if we proactively *think*, if we’ve set time aside to consider in quiet, then maybe it can become easier and faster to return more thoughtful responses to the world.

That’s why I think designers should write more.

I imagine it like a jigsaw puzzle; In one automatic instinctive approach you might open up the box and immediately begin to place down pieces that you think might go together at a quick glance. One after another you keep picking up individual pieces, trying and failing, trying and failing, until one inevitably sticks, then you repeat. Maybe you even start hunting for the edge or corner pieces because you know those are easier to string together. The issue I’ve found with this approach is that it requires constant action but also has a low chance of success. It gives the impression that you’re pushing the puzzle toward completion, when really you’re much more likely to be spinning your wheels. It reminds me of the Gretchen Ruben quote, “Just because we're busy doesn't mean we're being productive.” Constant, mindless action is a risky game.

A more thoughtful, considered approach might be something that caught my eye recently when i witnessed someone organizing their puzzle pieces into coordinated colour groupings on separate trays. It wasn’t fool proof, as some pieces have multiple colours on them, but generally, with a little bit of extra effort on the front end, it made the likelihood of placing each piece correctly much higher. The benefit is that you’ve front loaded some of the effort by taking time to stop, and think, and plan before actioning. As a result when it came to placing pieces (read: producing results), it was faster and with a much higher success rate.

A puzzle metaphor feels a bit vanilla, but it’s simple enough to draw the similarities to our workplaces where results hopefully translate directly to dollars. Think of the colour coding of your puzzle pieces as your pre-emptive thinking and writing, and the actual placement of those pieces on the board as the daily challenges you encounter at your job. At your job, producing quality material efficiently is how we can maximize our results. It’s how we can boost our value within our organization and beyond. These results are a culmination of the conversations we have, the alignment we can secure, the strategy we help to push, and the problems we help to solve. Whether it’s from seeding an idea, giving a presentation, or doing the ground work of banging out assets, it all ties back to communication and story telling.

When we step out of the noise, and find clarity in a quiet blank page, we return to the world all the sharper. We stop guessing where the pieces go. We trade shallow, instinctive answers for thoughtful, considered responses, providing more value to our teams and communities.

Everybody wins. That is why I think designers should write more.

Nat Green