Friday Reflections # 1

Routines and systems help me regulate my cognitive load and enables me to get more done. As a routine my fortnightly reflections happen on second Friday.

R1 is my first public reflection notes. If this helps some of you build routines then this thread is worth it. I start every year with an undesirable to desirable list and i pick an extreme undesirable aspect (just one) and make a difference that year. This year i picked "visual design".

My team is amazing at visuals but I am not there yet. So I decided to crush it this year. I could do some, but never took it really far.

Visual design is like Music. You must practice. You must put in time, effort, energy consistently. You get better and better slowly. So i took the formula for mastery from my life design preachings and started applying it to me.

Started with fundamentals with a beginner's mind. Conducted a number of experiments. Carved out some projects for visual practice. http://designu.substack.com is one of them. That is 1% zoom level of all practice art boards of just Design U in 2.5 weeks. I call this as Visual yoga.

Every morning, the first hour is split into 20-20-20. first 20 mins is silence. next 20 is verbals (daily pages) and last 20 mins is visuals. In addition to this, i started imitating amazing visuals when i was watching movies, listening to talks, waiting for people to show up :)

As a result, I spoke much lesser. I said a lot more. My brain thanked me for easing the cog load. My friends thanked me for articulating better.

Gosh! This printing press overloaded our brains with just words in the name of efficiency and operations 🤯 It is so not brain friendly 🙄

More than anything it was therapeutic. I am a lot more intellectually stimulated and calmer than before. Now I do send my visual for the day as a win in our diplomas channel. What a brain friendly breakthrough it has been. Such simple things to take care of wellbeing. Gratitude 🙏