It’s a challenge being productive for 8+ hours in the workday. I’ve come to realize, that I have peak times when I am at my best and most focused. One of those times is very early in the morning, before everyone is awake, and it’s really quiet. Another one of those times is very late at night, with the opposite scenario of the morning.

In the case of the modern information worker, nearly all tasks involve creative or strategic thinking. The way someone answers an email or interprets a piece of information can differ drastically depending on his or her energy level. Nobody does their best work 5:30 in the afternoon after they’ve been sucking down coffee all day to stay awake.

That’s not to say that I can’t get work done during the day, because I can, however, it’s not when I’m at my best. Especially when having to sit in a cube. In an ideal world, I think I would wake up early, crank out the important work until I feel drained, and handle all of the other miscellaneous duties (email, paperwork, etc.) for the rest of the day.

I’m pretty sure that I could get more creative work done in the first few hours of the day, than being forced to crank out something within 8-hours. This approach would be similar to 37signals’ 4-hours upfront strategy. After those few hours, come up for a recharge and evaluate what has been done.

So to the readers, do you find it hard to crank out 8 solid hours of work each day? And if not, what times of the day do you perform at your best?

Of course there is much more to learn, but here are a few key lessons that I’ve learned thus far.

Time Management

This has been very important to me. Having to work a full time job during the day leaves a very limited amount of time to run a business, so I’ve had to be very efficient with how I spent my time. Working all day, only to come home for more meetings and design work to do can wear on you pretty quickly. You want personal time to relax as well, so in order to balance that time, weekends become a big factor with managing time.

Every person has their own way of managing time, but what I’ve done for the Tridea would be to crank out a few days of solid hard work, little breaks, and get a good chunk of work done. Then I relax for a couple days. This isn’t a sure-fire plan, but it has worked for me. I can’t work all day, then all night for 5 days straight only to have a short weekend to relax, I like to spread my work out a bit more, because working on the weekends doesn’t bother me.

Focus

I can’t lie, sometimes it is extremely hard to stay focused on my work after coming home from an 8-9 hour work day. Somehow I manage to do it easier than other days. To help me focus, I ignore phone calls, non-business emails, turn on music, and just go at it. Once I start paying attention to non-business stuff while trying to work, that is when I lose focus. I’ve also learned not to force creativity. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t, so in the times that you don’t, just let your mind rest. It works wonders.

Choosing Clients

Since we’re in a position where we don’t exactly need every single project for the money, we’re able to pick and choose our clients. It’s awesome. When we meet with [potential] clients, we make sure that we have a good vibe going. If we don’t have a good feeling about it, we turn it down, no matter what the price tag is. A bad client experience is not worth the money. As Cameron Moll says:

I’ve turned down a fair share of projects based solely on the fact that something didn’t feel right at the outset. Fact of the matter is you’ll inevitably be faced with unknown variables in any decision, no matter how well you do your homework.

Communication

This is easily the most important, and the one thing that seems the most overlooked. Our first client was the hardest simply because of communication issues. There were just too many people involved in the project that didn’t need to be. My advice on communication, establish one point-of-contact. Dealing with that one person will help keep projects within the scope, and things will go much more smoothly. You don’t want to be taking direction from 5 different people. It’s not productive, and very frustrating.

In addition to what I mentioned above, keep the client in the loop throughout the whole project. It’s normally not a good thing if the client has to come find you. They should be apart of the whole design and development process. If you have an idea, let them know. It shows that you care about your client. Don’t just communicate with them at the beginning and end of a project.

Contracts are golden

We made the mistake of not having a contract on our first project, which we thought was going to be a quick and easy project. We were wrong. The timeline dragged further than it was supposed, and the project got out of scope. If we would have had a contract, it would have helped tremendously. From now on, no matter how big or small the project is, a contract is required. Outline everything that is entailed for the project within the contract. If the client wants something not in the contract, charge more and redraft the contract. It will save you lots of time and headaches.

As I said, we still have a whole lot to learn about running a business. We will face many more challenges down the road, but the first 6 months have been great, and I’ve obviously learned some useful lessons thus far. I hope to write more after another 6 months.

The first thing that came to mind after reading this article, was a post that I wrote about leaving desktop apps behind, and with Adobe’s decision to take Photoshop to the web, makes this all the more possible. Even though I use the web for basically everything, I don’t think that I will ever fully succumb to using a web browser for my primary photoshop use.

What makes me even more curious, is that if Adobe plans on having this web version of photoshop, what other apps in the creative suite do they plan on doing this with, because I’m quite sure that it has come up in conversation there.

As a colleague mentioned to me earlier, a cool feature about this being on the web would be the collaboration factor (in realtime), allowing multiple people to work on one document as a team. That is when using photoshop on the web would interest me. Is there even anything like that?

Seems like a good opportunity for Adobe, so we will see where this goes.

I’d like to know others’ thoughts on this.

I didn’t have any major goals for this site when I first started. I just told myself that I would write as well as I could, and write consistently, both which I think I have done a decent job on. So going into this new year, I don’t plan on changing much at all, except trying to become a better writer.

Most people like to do new years resolutions, however, I’ve never been big on the resolutions. I do, however, have a few things that I am looking forward to, and want, in this new year that I would like to briefly address:

A Redesign

As much as I like the current design of this site, I highly doubt that it will make it all the way through 2007. And since this is my design playground, I plan on doing at least one redesign. So when that happens, I will be going through my design process again, naming my inspiration, and so forth.

SXSW

I’ve never been to a conference before, so I am extremely geeked about having the chance to attend SXSW this year. I look forward to meeting some of my favorite bloggers and “celebrity” designers that I’ve looked up to since I began this whole design thing. And if you are going let me know!

Writing More In Depth

Like I already mentioned, I was pretty satisfied with my writing since I started this blog, however, I would like to maybe do some more in depth posts about design aspects and techniques. Writing some design critiques might be an interesting exercise as well. Never-the-less, I would like dig a little deeper into design and development more, to not only pick my brain, but the hopefully people that read here as well.

New Design

I am really interested in seeing some show stopping designs this year. I hope to see some people be the trend setters and come up with new ways to layout a page, or use new techniques to code. Maybe I could even do this!

More Apple!

I bought my first Apple machine in 2006, and ever since, I just can’t get enough. I hope Apple has an even better year than last and I will continue being a fanboy loyal customer! I especially look forward to using the new Leopard OS that will be releasing not too long from now.

Learn, Learn, Learn

You can never be the best you can be if you stop learning. I’d like to learn something new this year. My solid skill set contains photoshop, XHTML, and CSS. I’d like to go further and maybe learn more php, xml, or something along those lines. Of course one can only master so many traits, but knowing how things work at least is never bad.

So those are some things that I am looking forward to for 2007. Aside from the things above, I am expecting some huge things to happen, which I will discuss when they come up. So thanks for reading through 2006 and I hope you stick around for this brand new year.

What are you looking forward to for the big 007?

Every day I try to take a few minutes to think what could be beneficial to me or someone that I know. I’d like to take on some kind of a personal project that would keep my design and development skills touched up over time. This would be a long term project, so it’s not something that I would just want to dive into to get done in a rush.

For some reason, I feel that having a personal project, outside of the normal client work, holds some type of importance to me, and I wonder if others try and take on personal projects to get away from the normal, and sometimes stressful, client work. Now of course this doesn’t really have to be limited to web work, but since this is my life and passion, I really can’t see a personal project being in any other form.

For the past few months I’ve been working (with two other colleagues) on starting my own company, but I don’t think I would count that as a personal project, since that is what I’d like my full-time job to be one day.

So, though I don’t have a project for myself, it is something that I often think about because I think it would be beneficial to myself. Do you think having personal projects is important throughout a career path like design?