The Design Power of Time

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Welcome to The Daily Sprint, where today is a great day to design.

Here's your challenge.

Do you ever want to fast forward the design process?

There's times you must, but often it's forced on us by deadlines.

We're going to discuss the ways designers miss out when they don't consider time when designing, and 3 ways you can use the power of time to improve your work.

I'm Darrell Estabrook, the founder of designing, a platform for product designers, who want to design with a why.

I coach designers into leaders through real-time interactive product specific guidance.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com

Welcome.

It's episode 16.

Sweet indeed.

We're moving right along.

So have you ever thought you could skip parts of the design process in order to meet a deadline?

Yes, it's inevitable.

Where's always more design that needs to happen than there is time.

There's always more demands on our time than we can filter out.

I don't know how many times I've tried all sorts of time management things, techniques, 20 minutes on and timers, and some of those things really work for people.

So that's great.

But I think overall, when we're talking about time, it's a real pressure and it really is something we want to force.

It forces us to make compromises in the design process that we probably shouldn't.

I wonder if you feel like feeding all your requirements into AI will really help you fast forward and create a plan.

And maybe you've simply just made assumptions and plowed ahead with your design.

But with all of that, there's one ingredient you can't escape, and that's the value of time.

There's a real power in using time as a design element.

I'm not talking about animations or things like that.

I'm talking about the process of creating something, taking the time it needs to see it through.

The reality is we are in a rush for everything.

I think the whole AI scene that's come about has accelerated the need to make things faster, like just do it now, on demand.

We're trying to be creative on demand.

And that's not really how creativity steeps, seeps.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It's this 2 edged sword, right?

We can move forward quickly.

But then are we pausing long enough to reflect on what just happened?

And I think there's a lot of times we miss details when we rush.

Whether using AI or not.

It really doesn't matter the tool.

It's really a mindset.

And that's huge as a designer.

We're really here to facilitate the process of designing and not just be a button pushing, you know, plow it through.

And sometimes that's how it feels, especially in business.

So time is really required for discovery.

You can't just pop it into your head.

It would be nice.

Instant knowledge.

It's really not how we are made.

We're not made to know everything.

We are not omniscient.

And this world was made to discover.

We are to find things and you have to go exploring.

Virtually, even physically exploring to find out new stuff.

And time is required for thinking.

How many times have you simply stopped?

And thought.

And really pondered.

This isn't mindless, um, clearing your mind or emptying your mind.

We'll talk about that in a bit, but really thinking through something without a digital device, thinking through maybe even going analog, like doing something different, just thinking, drinking a cup of tea and thinking.

Yeah it requires time to do that.

And time is required to see results, right?

We want them right now.

Again, AI. Lets you see the results instantly.

But it's kind of a, I don't know, like a hydrated result in a lot of ways, especially when we're talking creativity.

It's like a gardener, right?

You plant the seed and you don't get tomatoes, if that's what you plant it, you don't get them immediately.

You can take a picture of it every day and at the end of 2 months, you can watch it and say, wow, look how fast that grew.

But you really won't get the results of it unless you go through time.

And it's a good thing.

These are good things.

Business kind of pushes against that because time is money is how they say, right.

Time is advantage.

Time can really make or break the success of something, decisions need to be made on time.

But we're going to discuss the ways designers miss out when they don't consider time.

You could really be short-changing yourself as a designer.

And 3 ways that you can use this power of time to improve your work.

So, Before we run into all of that.

I just want to clarify the design process.

So I've said design process.

I'll mention it often.

And there are so many design processes out there named, unnamed, specific, general, recent, old.

We've been around for a while.

There's so many of them.

But there's one that I've built an approach on over the past several years.

And I'm calling it the designy framework, and it's very familiar to you pieces and parts.

It might even be something that you would say, oh, well, I already know that because I was maybe different labels on it.

And that's okay.

But I think this is something that is really universal and you can't avoid it.

So take a look at this really quickly.

There's 5 aspects to it, and even though I'm showing it in order, kind of in order.

It's really, not just a linear process, but it's nonlinear.

You can jump back and forth as you're going through a specific design, but it's really important.

These things are always present in every design situation.

In fact, in everything possible to design, whether it's what we're doing is product design or architecture or strategy.

So just look at these.

Define purpose, discover context, create options, make choices, and measure results.

So you always need to have a purpose.

Sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's not.

You gotta you gotta get that straight.

Context is that surrounding information that adds, it kind of puts a boundary on the sandbox of where you can play.

Creating the options.

Well, this is the thing that people want to jump straight to designers, you know, I know I love to open up the design program or if even if you're using AI prompt, you know, just jump right into it and let's just start creating stuff.

It's really fun.

And if you've got a talent for it, you're you're loving it.

You're enjoying it.

It's great.

But you can't just jump right there.

We need the previous two.

And then making choices, it's a very deliberate step that might just be flippant in some cases, but there's a real controlled way to do it.

And then measure results.

This doesn't have to be a super formal research project, but it is something to do deliberately.

All these inform themselves.

I've got a whole master class that goes through this, that you can take, we'll say more of that at the end.

But this process is something you will go through every time you design.

You'll encounter these every time you design.

So you can't avoid it, but you can ignore it, and that's the part.

If you ignore any one of these, you kind of short circuit the process and you'll end up with something less effective as far as your design.

It might cause more churn or spin.

And all of that.

So, these are all necessary.

But what happens when we rush it, right?

If we skip ahead.

So some of these ways designers miss out when they don't consider time when designing.

We really, it kind of comes down to when you skip parts of the design process, you're forced to make an assumption.

Now, assumptions are necessary.

Again, we're not omniscient.

That would be...

I think if we were an omniscient, there's a whole other world of problems going on there.

But that's okay.

Assumptions are necessary.

But how do you know you're assuming correctly?

There's always this other question that comes up, right?

Okay, assumptions are good.

Good assumptions are like you could consider your experience, right?

If you've done this a number of years or anything, right?

If you've gained experience, you can make a reasonable assumption.

And that is invaluable.

In fact, that is storing up knowledge and and you don't have to always go to ground zero.

You have to start from blank.

That's good.

That's a natural occurring thing that happens with us.

We're made with a brain to remember things.

And that sort of thing.

So good assumptions.

There are good assumptions.

You have to temper those with the bad assumptions.

So bad assumptions.

If you to fill in the blank with something arbitrary.

It's called guesswork.

And guesswork happens to be not designing.

Because guessing is random and design is on purpose.

It just, it's just that's the way it is.

You can't break it down.

So bad assumptions.

And you might say lucky guess in there, if the bad assumption turns out good or happy accident, we kind of, you know, work into some of those things.

And those are what they are.

We're not going to try to weed those out per se.

But we want to know, we want to be aware that assumptions are floating around.

And when we chop this out we're making assumptions.

You kind of think of it as with AI, right?

It's making assumptions.

And a lot of times it'll present the results as complete, especially in this design process.

I keep going back to that when we're talking about AI.

Because there's a lot that goes into it or needs to go into it.

Because AI will make mistakes.

But so do we, right?

We're making mistakes all the time.

We learn from them and we adapt and that's part of this process.

The other part of that is we have wisdom.

And wisdom goes with that experience component and really makes the difference.

AI doesn't have wisdom.

So, here are 33 actions you can take to really harness the power of time as you design.

So the 1st action, take the time for discovery.

The more you intake, the more context you have for making design decisions.

So like I mentioned, right, purpose, you need to understand the purpose of what you're doing, outcomes, there's a lot more into that one, but the context itself.

It's just so easy to make assumptions on context.

It's also easy to go light on context.

Try to get summaries and things like that.

You know, you might not be the design expert or the domain expert in the product that you're designing, maybe not at first, especially if you're 1st hired, or if you're a consultant, right?

You may not be the expert.

But if you're curious, right, you have that drive of curiosity, you can become a pretty reliable design partner.

And that's the biggest thing.

You don't, no one's asking you to become the subject matter expert, but if you seek out a subject matter expert, that's, that's their bread and butter.

They really want that, well, they've made their living around whatever the domain is.

So seek that person out, find them, make them your best friend in the project. And be the facilitator of design and really leverage them.

Ask them questions, try to put yourself in their shoes, so to speak.

And take the time for that discovery.

You can also do scrappy research.

And that's down and dirty, not a formal research kind of thing.

It doesn't take long.

Internet searches, reading, you know, PDF documents, that have been other books, things like that, anything that you can get your hands on in a short matter of time is scrappy.

And that's a good thing.

I kind of like to say in that, read firsthand information.

Right?

So summaries are okay.

I think you need, it's easy to get up to speed with a summary. Overview, that sort of thing.

AI summaries and all that.

But it's not the same as understanding context.

You can ramp up, you can get the 10,000 foot view, you know, flyover.

It might help you know where to dig, you know, where to land.

But it takes time to read.

It doesn't have to be days, but you really can't accumulate meaningful knowledge in mere minutes.

So that's really the, you know, the tug of war there.

Take the time for discovery.

So the 2nd action that you can use to leverage the power of time is use time away from your design to improve your work.

It's a little counterintuitive, right?

I just need to apply more time to this work.

But that's not how we operate.

It's not how we kind of breathe as people.

Plan some time to rest from designing.

You can take like an hour or maybe 2 hours or some amount of time away from your project.

Like walk away, like literally, go do something else. Overnight, sometimes, how many times have I been staring at a design, working on it, or trying to solve a problem, anything like that, but especially the visual nature of it.

And you either fall in love with what you're looking at, because you've designed it.

You know, just, I just loved what I did there.

Yay, me.

And then you go to sleep, come back the next day and you're like, what was I thinking?

Or, or it's like, oh, wow, that part of it is really good and now I see the weaknesses.

Awesome all the time.

It resets your brain and you get to notice these details.

So it's really good to take some time resting from what you're doing.

And then plan time to discuss the design, right?

So you're not designing.

But you're going to discuss it with, especially stakeholders.

This is something that you can do really quickly with them, 15 to 30 minute meetings.

If you do that every day.

It'd be a good touch point. Do a number of things.

You'd be able to, well, develop a relationship with a stakeholder.

I get to know them better, even the subject matter expert, you know, who that is as a person.

That's a good thing, in order to review the design.

And then it doesn't take a lot of their time. Which we'll talk about later.

But it takes you away from what you're doing long enough to see their perspective.

So same thing, like, you take some time away from your design, and you can see, you know, oh, wow, that's my perspective has changed.

And then plan time to think about the design.

So this is kind of like coupled with that, taking some time away as well as discussing it.

Sometimes you actually need to think through what you're doing or the domain you're in without actually designing anything.

So you can get so into the technical moving stuff around or.

Changing colors or comparing, you know, all the detail work that we do with the act of designing.

But this is where you like take a walk.

Like the idea is that you're actually thinking about the problem, but you're not doing the activity to design.

You're really, you're processing it.

Sometimes this works really well with a mindless, I say mindless, but repetitive activity.

So it's something that you don't have to concentrate on.

So, like, I probably wouldn't suggest going and, um, creating architectural plans for, you know, a new shed in the back, like, not another creative activity, necessarily, but washing the dishes.

Right?

Like I said, take a walk.

Build something physical.

Like something that would require action on your part, but you don't have to really plan or be precise with it.

I used to do origami a whole lot, right?

Paper folding, those paper cranes.

I love that.

And it's something that once you learn the folds and what has to happen with it, you could just kind of just keep folding the paper and just keep folding it.

And you know what you're doing, but you're thinking about the problem, your mind kind of meander.

And that's just good because now you're not trying to think of where to place the pixels.

You're not, you know, critiquing in real time, the design.

It just gets you, some freedom from just staring down the same hole of the problem.

And the 3rd action that you can take delivered to power of design is to demonstrate the value of this time with stakeholders.

So I like to think of it as using stakeholder time wisely.

This is a general principle for anyone, really.

When you use other people's time wisely, they trust you with more of it.

And you get more of their attention.

How many times have you been in a meeting?

Well, how many times have you had a meeting scheduled, that's an hour, hour and a half , something like that.

And it's like, ugh.

When are we gonna give, you're gonna, uh, your brain is gonna grind to a halt.

If you go into the meetings of such length or the flip side of it and someone, you know, has a half hour meeting and they run long, you know, without it being the natural, you know, cadence of it or asking, you know, kind of go a little longer, that sort of thing.

You know, people don't like that, right?

Nobody likes that.

But when you do it on purpose. 30 minute meeting, 30 minutes, I'm done.

Hour?

I'm done, right?

15 minutes?

Really?

If you can do that, that's great.

Don't schedule the huge meetings too.

I find 15 minutes is really optimistic.

If it's a quick question.

Great.

Uh, you always say, can I have 15 minutes of your time?

It's not going to be 5 minutes.

Rarely, is it 5 minutes?

Half hour is a bit of a commitment.

But a half hour meeting is a legitimate thing, especially if you have a design to show, a very specific thing to show.

Those are great because you're showing work.

So whatever you schedule, you got to be very precise and specific with what you're going to talk about.

So I like to think about it, like questions that are going to unblock you.

Those are the most valuable for you and for them.

And discuss it often.

So you're not just talking to the stakeholder and then not seeing them for a week or two.

It's kind of this formula.

Maybe it's a formula.

We can write it out.

It would be good.

Shorter meetings, plus focus topics, times more often.

So you do that. Equals faster decisions and more effective designs.

Nice.

And stakeholders see how you use this time, and then the result of the design.

So it's like, hey, I spent time with them, a very little amount of time, and wow, look at the progress we're making.

And the influence I'm having, right, that starts to demonstrate this connection between time and design and that you are able to, say, control it, but you are using it well, like a good steward of a resource.

That's a really good thing.

So those are the 3 ways that you can use time and it's like a design superpower.

I mean, designers have all these interactive traits that they can really leverage in the position you're in.

So take time for discovery.

Take time to rest from your designing and use stakeholders time wisely.

It's a great thing.

You can maximize your daily sprint because today is the day.

You get to design.

It's not tomorrow, hasn't existed yet.

It's not there yet. Past is done.

Today is your daily sprint.

Use today's time wisely.

And so I mentioned earlier, the designing framework, and all that's in that, how you really can't avoid it.

But I go really deep in that, in a masterclass that I've put up on designing academy.

So it's called design for value.

And I go deep on each of those waypoints, but really, I, the goal of that is to show you the connection between purposeful design decisions and this framework and how you can connect that to stakeholders. Designing on purpose for value.

Right now, there's 50% launch special through May 15th, 2026.

So go to academy.designy.com.

And if your product designer and you've got some something to say about even time, like how do how have you managed time in your designs and leveraged it, I'd love to hear from you, I'd love you to be a guest on the daily sprint if you want to go that far.

I've got a button on designey.com that says become a guest on the daily sprint.

Go out, fill out that application, and if it's a match, it'll be great to have you on the podcast.

And while you're there, sign up for the free newsletter, at least just stay in contact. Designy.com

So thanks for listening to the Daily Sprint.

Remember, today is a great day to design with a why.

See you next time.