- Good morning friends.
It is Friday and it is one of those weeks where
I both feel like, how is it already Friday
but also it should already be the weekend
at the same time.
If that makes sense.
(upbeat music)
I don't know what it's been about this week.
I had Monday off, so it's been a short week
but it is still felt long and overwhelming.
I'm currently looking at my to-do list
to figure out what I can actually wrap up this week
and what is going to be one of those
move to next week sort of situations.
I've been struggling to prioritize time working on
our design system this week.
I'll leave a link on a card to watch the
design system update video I made
but it's a really important project,
but it's one of those ones that is so large
that it just, I dunno
I find myself working on the stuff
that is more immediate and urgent
but I know that that is just going to
get me into a mess if I don't start
prioritizing this design system stuff.
So I have it on my to-do list.
Clearly like the me who said this to-do list
at the end of last week
understood that I'm struggling with,
because what it says is spend one hour
exploring your illustration ideas
for the product overview page.
One hour.
Surely that is something that I can get done today.
In previous weeks I just had product overview
page on the list.
And of course, then I never got to it.
So that is really something I need to do today.
I'll show you what I'm talking about there.
So this is the product of your page.
You've seen me work on this
in coworking club streams in several blogs
but this is a place order illustration for the top here.
Hopefully it communicated the vision,
but yeah I wanna try figure out what
this could actually look like in reality.
Same with product imagery.
Yeah, we have these little screenshots
of our product with floating bits of UI.
I think they're too small at the moment
to really see a whole lot of
what's going on there.
So I just wanna see what I can do about that
to get the product itself,
to take up a bit more space.
And I had feedback, especially that
at this screen size it's too small,
which makes a lot of sense.
And I might need to make a change to this UI.
I also need to spend some time working on
some communication stuff to do with
team vision structure, that sort of thing.
So really like we go on high level
always zoomed in to the pixels today,
which yeah makes for some challenging mental shifts
but it's what needs to get done.
Have a few hours of meetings this afternoon.
And I also have a dentist appointment coming up in an hour.
So, what I think I'm gonna do for the next hour is
I think for the next hour,
I'm gonna work on communication stuff
because I would love to get a live stream in today.
So I might better do that when
I come back from the dentist.
This is riveting stuff, isn't it.
You just watched me work through my
to-do list for a few minutes, yeah.
I would honestly love to know what
you want to see in blogs.
I will be making more and more blogs
especially as I'm working on my book.
I just find it's just a bit easier to fit
into my schedule than planning, writing
and filming a proper video if that makes sense.
But I do wanna make sure that
you're getting what you want out of these vlogs
and you're finding them interesting
that I'm showing the things that you wanna be seeing.
My goal with them is just to show you what
life is like as a remote working designer
leading a team at a small tech company.
So if there's ever anything in particular
you want me to go into detail in
in these vlogs or to show,
then please leave a comment.
Let me know.
I'm always open to that sort of feedback.
But for now I think I'm going to
open up my trusty FigJam.
I swear, I spend more time in FigJam these days
than in Figma, like working in Figma files themselves
and not too mad about it.
(cheerful instrumental music)
Well, that was easy.
She looked in my mouth for like 30 seconds
and was like, everything looks fine.
(speaker laughing)
Quite a contrast to last year
when I went to the dentist
they told me I needed my wisdom teeth out.
So then I went through the whole
surgery process for that.
So yeah, good.
Finally having some good teeth news.
(speaker laughing)
(cheerful upbeat music)
Well that was fun.
Managed to fit in a short little live stream
just an hour but still better than nothing.
That was an hour of focusing on the design system
and getting my head around component properties.
Let me show you briefly what I worked on
just so you don't have to watch
the whole hour long live stream.
See, so this quote block here.
Well, okay.
What's Nora doing?
Apparently climbing.
Okay.
(speaker laughing)
We'll leave her to it.
This is a quote block on a new product overview page
and I wanted to set it up as a component
in the design system
because I think we'll also use it on yeah
other pages within the feature section of our site.
So I've set it up.
I have variants and also been getting
my head around component properties.
So well let's come over here and look at one.
So I have all of our brand colors.
I have the option to have the photo
on the left or the right.
And then we have these component properties
to change the quote,
the creator name and the byline
and to choose whether you wanna show the link or not.
I definitely feel like that was time well spent.
I was feeling super out of the loop on
not understanding component properties
enough in practice I feel like I got them
in theory but not in practice it.
So yeah, that was good.
I did not yet though start on the illustration
for the product overview page
but I have meetings starting in 20 minutes.
I wanna get my thoughts in order.
Get my notes for what I wanna get out of these meetings.
I always like to do that
because one I feel like ask a manager
it's on me to make sure the meetings are productive,
that I'm communicating the right feedback
to people on my team, et cetera.
And also just in general I think
it's good practice to think about
what you're hoping to get out of a meeting
before you have it.
Sometimes there are meetings where you
just show up and shoot the (beep) and chat.
But yeah, these meetings today
they actually have needs
not just connection meetings.
So I'm gonna type some notes up about that.
Then I'll have to get onto the illustration
thing in a gap between meetings later on today.
I also just realized that I was wearing
this shirt in my last vlog as well.
And I swear that I have washed it since then.
It's just that it's my favorite shirt at the moment.
So you'll probably be seeing it a bunch.
(speaker laughing)
(upbeat music)
Oh man, we just had a two and a half hour planning meeting.
Planning for our next cycle.
We work in these six week cycles
with the two week cool down.
So yeah, that was a lot.
My eyes hurt from staring at the screen.
I have another hour long meeting to end the day.
And I have not gotten, I mean, yeah
we knew I was gonna end up saying this.
I have not finished my to-do list.
I have not gone on as far as I wanted to.
But I do feel like the extra time that we
were spending in that planning was really useful.
I mean, I'll like show you a super zoomed
out version of where we worked on
because I don't know if we wanna share
all of our plan just yet.
We share a lot of things but I wanna be careful.
I was using FigJam to take notes
so you can see this is cycle four
cycle five, cycle six as we were going.
And it was very useful to have this
visual look at the plans we were talking about.
FigJam is just the way my brain works.
You know, like seeing things mapped out
visually being able to color code
and stuff like that.
Just love it so much.
Okay, let's rally 10 minutes go
until my next meeting.
I wanna start up a doc for us to work in.
And then I need to round up my day by
we do these check-ins every single week
in this tool called 15five.
I talked about this in my video I made about
how I plan my week following to that.
This tool ask us questions of like
has my priorities that I set for this week
in it that I can mark as complete
or like put notes on.
It asks what do you intend to accomplish
between now and your next check-in?
So that's where I sort of start roughly
planning my week of the key,
like the big rocks of the things
that I need to get done next week.
It ask what went well this week,
what's your biggest challenge right now.
And then there's a space to
give a high five virtually
to people on the team too.
It's a nice routine to end the week with
filling this out, starting to
think ahead to next week.
I find I can shut off for the weekend easier
if I've done this because I know that
I'm not having to think about planning next week
and that like I've already started.
Right, I can just show up on Monday
and start tackling the plans
that I made on Friday.
So overall I'm just gonna look at my calendar
and count this up.
I will have spent four and a half hours in meetings today
and it's meant to be no meeting Fridays
but what that often ends up being
for those of us who management is that
it's free space in the calendar time
to get together with a wider group of people.
So that's what yeah, we were doing
in the planning meeting,
definitely worth doing though.
Anyway, when you've been at
ConvertKit for five years you get
a month long sabbatical paid time off
like extra on top of your regular vacation time.
And my sabbatical is coming up
in like just a few weeks.
And so planning is really important for me right now.
because I wanna make sure that my team
has what they need when I go out on leave.
It's honestly it's exciting but also stressful
to think about not working for a month,
not being in my work slack
not checking in on what's going on.
I'm planning on completely checking out
and not being involved at all.
But yeah, it does mean that I need to
set my team up with a plan so that they know
what needs to happen and who they should talk to
about different things that
might come up while I'm out.
Anyway, because we had that planning meeting
I am starting to feel slightly
better about that which is good.
Okay, let's get on with making this doc
and this last meeting of the day.
I really honestly feel like I could use another coffee
and that is probably not a smart thing to do at 7:00 PM.
So I'm gonna power through.
(slow music)
I did it.
I made it through Friday.
Dinner is on its way, which is good
because I'm very hungry and do not feel like cooking.
The computer is shut down.
I think I'm going to go open of the ear
and yeah slide into weekend mode.
Thanks for watching this vlog.
I hope it was interesting just to see
a regular old work day in my life.
One that had more meeting time than I expected
and I got less done than I expected.
So what else is new?
If you were one of the people who
joined me for the live stream,
thank you very much for showing up.
It's always so nice to yeah
see you all your faces in there.
I'm going to try and make them
a more regular Friday thing.
But yeah, like I said I'm going on sabbatical soon
so I won't be doing work during that time.
I might be creating some other things though.
Like I'm thinking of working on my website
as part of it, but yeah, we'll have to see.
Anyway, thanks for watching.
Have a good week and I'll see you in the next vlog.
Bye.
(upbeat music)