Never miss a design deadline again

Do you ever feel like you're dead slow at designing? Like you're sitting there for hours, sometimes the whole day, without generating reasonable results while deadlines creep inexorably closer?

Sometimes it's a real struggle to get in a flow state. That's a shame because being in a creative flow is the most joyful aspect of being a designer. It's also a shame because of the tsunami of anxiety and crushing pressure that mounts when deadlines are looming.

And all that anxiety, beyond a certain threshold, does nothing to help you perform better and drives you even further from the promised land of creative flow.

We've all been there. You're not alone. And there is a solution.

Though beginners experience this phenomenon more frequently, experienced designers are not immune: I suddenly started experiencing this again after many successful years as a product designer when I was an early employee at a YC backed startup. Trust me, the pressure and stress was profound. But I slashed my way out of the jungle of creative resistance.

You can do it too. In fact, there is one, simple, actionable thing you can do that will crack this problem wide open.

The solution

The one thing you should do... is anything. That's right. Do anything. More specifically:

1. Write down one user problem you're trying to solve with your design. Ideally the biggest one, but any one will do. Don't get hung up on this. Pick one.
2. Put the problem statement right above your Figma frame.
3. Start a timer for 25 minutes and begin blocking out a low-fidelity design that attempts to address your chosen problem.
4. Set zero expectations for yourself. Just make literally anything.

It's a lot harder to go from 0 to 1 than from 1 to 100. In fact, it's so hard that Peter Thiel wrote an entire book about it. So set a lower bar, time box yourself, and get something out there. Put a stake in the ground so you can begin iterating.

The problem of feeling unproductive as a designer has many causes and many solutions. For example, you might want to seek out great inspiration, optimize your design workflow, learn the 20% of hotkeys that impact 80% of your design work, and understand the psychology of flow states.

But what really holds us up as designers is not the speed of designing, it's the speed of getting started. It's creative friction. It's procrastination. It's a form of performance anxiety. That's why the most important solution is the one I've described here: Time box yourself and get literally anything on the page.

Feel free to mess with this formula, but here's a simple recipe for guaranteed results:

But.. but.. we need 10 variations! What about divergent thinking? And it needs to look as good as Linear and we have 17 use cases! Shhhh shhh shh. Shhhh.

You need 1 variation to get to 10. It has to exist in order to be as good as Linear. You need to address 1 use case to get to 17. So keep it simple, cut through the noise, and get started now.

And all the other ways to demolish design deadlines that I mentioned? I'll be doing deep dives on them as well within the next few weeks.

Subscribe and I'll send those over to you when they're ready so you can kill deadline anxiety for good.