Voosh Themes

10 Tips For Becoming A More Efficient Web Designer

Becoming more efficient at your work has a number of obvious benefits. In particular, it enables you to turn around work much faster (hopefully without compromising on quality) and frees you up to work on other projects.

From a freelancer’s perspective this can be advantageous as it means that you can essentially make more money. For employees it means that you can impress your managers and potentially enhance your chances of getting a promotion or pay rise (depending on who you work for ).

However, being more efficient isn’t always about making more money – sometimes it can simply be about having more spare time to do things that you enjoy such as participating in your favorite hobby or spending time with friends and family. It all depends on your goals and personal circumstances.

In this post I want to highlight a number of things that have helped me to become more efficient when doing web design work.

1. Get Organized

This first tip is fairly obvious – if you want to become more efficient you have to become more organized. This includes organizing your tasks, client work, files, web bookmarks, accounts, and anything else that is relevant to your work. If you’re constantly looking for things you can’t find, or are unaware of approaching deadlines, you’re going to miss things and cause problems for yourself.

One of the main things that has helped my productivity is organizing all of my tasks into a single place. Before this I found that my daily/weekly tasks would end up all over the place either scribbled on different bits of papers or hidden away in emails. This clearly isn’t optimal and there are some great applications out there such as Things and Omnifocus that can help you manage your tasks more effectively.

2. Review Your Daily Tasks

This is an absolute must for me! I find that creating a list of tasks each evening that need to be completed for the following day makes me SO much more productive. Whenever I fail to do this I find that my focus for the following day is lacking and I never get as much done as I’d like. For some reason doing it the night before is always more effective for me than first thing in the morning.

3. Eliminate Potential Distractions

Given that we do most of our work online there’s the potential for so many different types of distractions – whether it’s being notified of tweets, Facebook updates, or new email, it’s very easy for your flow to be interrupted when doing design work. I’ve found that in order to get some serious work done all of these applications need to be switched off! I then tend to switch them back on when I need a break (normally after an hour or so) for around five-ten minutes before getting on with work again.

4. Tailoring Your Tools

This was something that I rarely used to do in the past and it was a big mistake! I just wanted to get on with new projects and never took the time to configure and optimize the tools I was using. Instead I would just use the default settings that the application/software came pre-configured with.

Making a few tweaks to optimize your software to support your workflow can provide massive benefits to your productivity. The Adobe suite of products are a great example of this – there are lots of ways in which you can optimize these applications through the use of keyboard shortcuts. The same also applies to development applications such as Coda and TextMate.

Whilst it might seem a pain in the short-term, take some time to learn how your tools work and how you can tailor them to suit your personal needs – in the long-term it will make you much more efficient and productive.

5. Keep A Library Of Code Snippets

This one goes without saying. If there are pieces of code that you are using on a regular basis it’s a good idea to keep a central copy of them that you can easily access when you require that particular type of functionality for a project.

They can be your own code snippets or they can be other ones that you collect from around the Web (e.g. check out Snipplr). There’s obvious benefits to using code snippets – for instance, they help you save time as you can literally copy and paste the code into your new project.

They also make your code consistent across multiple projects – this can be particularly handy if you have to do some work on an older project as you will instantly be familiar with the code and will be able to make the appropriate updates much more efficiently.

6. Use Plugins

Where possible it’s worth considering the use of plugins to create the type of functionality that you’re after. I suppose here I thinking primarily in terms of WordPress and jQuery plugins that are often freely available around the Web. This stops you from having to reinvent the wheel each time and allows you to save on development time.

A recent example of this is the affiliate program that I set up here at Voosh Themes – I was considering building something myself as I thought it would be interesting to do, but I also knew it would take up a considerable chunk of time that I didn’t really have available. So instead I purchased a WordPress plugin (WP Affiliate Program if you’re interested) that did everything for me. It works great, was very reasonable in terms of price, and saved me a huge amount of development time.

The same also applies with jQuery plugins – if there are some nice interactive effects you want to use on a site see if there’s a jQuery plugin that you integrate into your work. Obviously there’s a balance here – coding solutions yourself can be interesting and will provide you with some good experience – but you have to weigh that against the time you have and the deadlines/tasks you have to get done.

7. Set Yourself Challenging Deadlines

This is something I regularly do myself that I find helps make me more efficient. For example, instead of saying that I need to complete task X by the end of today, I find it useful to set a more specific and challenging deadline like “I need to complete task X by 3pm”. It’s only a subtle difference but I find it helps to focus my attention on the task in hand and motivates me to get it completed in good time.

8. Creating A Nice Working Environment

A pleasant working environment can really do wonders for your productivity! The definition of a “pleasant working environment” is quite a subjective thing, but for me it includes have a clean and tidy desk to work from in a room with lots of natural light (i.e. near a window). However, I know this is down to personal taste – a lot of people like clutter and actually enjoy working in that type of environment more.

I used to have quite a messy desk on a regular basis, but a while ago I decided to make a conscious effort to keep things tidier – and I have to say that I much prefer it and find it much easier to focus on my work without lots of bits of paper, books, and other rubbish lying around.

9. Be Aware Of Your Optimal Work Patterns

I think this is a very important point. You need to be aware of when you do your best work – not only that, you need to know which *type* of work you do best at which times of the day.

For example, I find that I write best first thing in the morning – if I try and do it in the middle of the day, or later at night, I just seem to struggle with it more and the words don’t flow quite as well. When doing design work I find that I do it best (and enjoy it more) when I work in the evenings.

Take some time to consider what works best for you and when you work most efficiently.

10. Avoid Working Long Hours

I have to admit that this is something I really struggle with! Whenever I generate some extra time through getting daily tasks completed ahead of time, I tend to fill that “spare” time with more work. This is largely because I enjoy what I do, but at the same time I think it’s important to get away from the computer and do something else.

Having that “burned out” feeling isn’t nice and can result in you seeing your work as a chore and you’ll become less motivated. Taking regular breaks will help to keep you fresh, enthusiastic and motivated – which in turn will make you more efficient and productive.

Conclusion

I hope you find some of these tips helpful – a lot of them are just common sense, but I think it’s helpful to be reminded of them from time to time. Do you think there’s anything important that I’ve missed? What techniques do you use to make yourself more efficient and productive? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.