How to 'Steal Time'

I was listening to Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm, my favorite podcast about books, when his guest, Jim Gauer, the poet, venture capitalist and author of Novel Explosives, said something about getting up in the early hours of the morning to work on his book that caught my attention. "A kindred spirit," I thought, as I too had written my book Design the Life You Love by getting up 4:30-5am everyday, while my family was still asleep.

"The novel, so that everyone knows, due to mistakes that I made along the way, took 7 days a week, 365 days a year, 7 years to write. I made a terrible mistake late in the book, had to rip out a year's worth of work and it took a year and a half to replace it. But it was a daily, getting up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning to write."

Listening to Gauer, I realized that getting up early was a way of "stealing time".

Stealing time is creating precious time out of an already packed schedule to do something that is important to you. For me this was the hours before my kids got up and my work day started. To steal time, I trained myself to get up early.

NYTimes' Sketch Guy, Carl Richards, recently wrote about an epiphany he had about where time goes after his wife called out his habit of 'half-working'. He installed a program called Rescue Time that monitored everything he did on his computer. After tracking his activities for a month, he found that his wife wasn't so wrong after all (no surprise there).

"I spent 45 hours and 38 minutes on things I'd labeled unproductive. After I carefully reviewed all the inputs for errors and found none, I pulled out my trusty calculator and did some painful math: It was two and a half hours per working day in May."

Try Richards' technique and find your lost time-where it goes and how much. Once you do, you might want to heed to Beth Comstock's advice about making room for discovery. Comstock, the Vice Chair at GE, reserves 10% of her time for curiosity--to learn new things by going to conferences, taking time to ideate and to talk to people.

"Can I spend 10% of my time a week reading, going to sites like Singularity, TED, talking to people, going to industry events, asking people: What trends are you seeing? What are you nervous about? What are you excited about?"

There are other ways to "steal time" and here are a few:

- Simplify your life to save time. Minimizing choice helps recuperate time lost on decision making.

- Delegate work to others. Note to parents and myself, this includes delegating house work to your kids.

- Stay focused on one task at a time as switching from one task to another is a big time and energy drain. I use the Pomodoro app to focus my time on one thing at a time.

But if you'd like to see something really ingenious, check out this new product that my graduate student Jingting He designed in my class at SVA (School of Visual Arts). Called the Time Thief Clock, her timepiece comes with an app that steals 1 minute out of each hour, which disappears right in front of your eyes at exactly the 59th minute of each hour, and gives it back to you as 24 minutes at the end of each 24 hour cycle. Now that is a chunk of time you can do so much with.

How do you "steal" time and what do you do with it? I would love to hear from you.

Design the life and work you love!

How to Be a Designers' CEO Like Elon Musk

Elon Musk is doing right by design. In a recent interview on Y Combinator (often called the world's No. 1 startup incubator), Musk explained that he spends 80 percent of his time on engineering and design, developing next-generation products. He is what I call a designers' CEO.

Musk's optimism in the face of great odds (SpaceX, the company he founded "to revolutionize space technology," had a 10 percent chance of success at the onset); his belief that beauty is as important as the usefulness of products (from the Tesla door handles to his more recent aspiration to bring aesthetics to SolarCity tiles); his strong sense of empathy with others (feeling for every parent who ever put a child's seats into a minivan, which led to Tesla's falcon wing doors); and the humanity with which he goes after what designers call "wicked problems" (e.g. multiplanetary habitation) make him, if not a designer, a rare and much welcome enabler of ground-breaking design.

Here's what makes Musk a "designful" leader:

1. Proximity to creativity

Do you know of any other CEO today that can say they spend 80 percent of their time developing the next generation of products? Musk spends half a day each week at the Tesla design studio, sitting next to Tesla's chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen. There is an intentional physical closeness, a proximity to creativity, that is missing in most large corporations. Musk literally rubs elbows with design, which gives him a visceral sense of the problem solving and allows him to partake in the creativity that goes on in the design studio.

2. Having an eye

When Musk started SpaceX, he learned how to build rockets from scratch. He has a similar approach to developing an eye for good design, educating himself visually. He has a mental bank of visual references to help him understand what he's looking for in a design and how to communicate it to the design team. It is this eye that Musk uses to discern beauty.

Musk uses this to distinguish his company from competitors, transforming ugly products into things of beauty--from electric cars (Tesla) to home batteries (Powerwall) to solar tiles (this is in progress at the recently acquired SolarCity).

3. Lead, not follow

Great design takes guts. You're imagining the future based on what you know today, and that requires vision, intuition, inspiration, and leaps of faith in the face of serious risk of failure. Musk joins a small group of people with singular visions of what the world needs, and is not afraid to lead us there. Steve Jobs belongs in that group. As does mid-century pioneer George Nelson, designer and author. What Nelson wrote for the Herman Miller catalogue, as quoted in Ralph Caplan's book, The Design of Herman Miller, can speak for all three men:

You decide what you will make. Herman Miller has never done any market research or any pretesting of its products to determine what the market "will accept." If designer and management like a solution to a particular furniture problem, it is put into production. There is no attempt to conform to the so-called norms of "public taste," nor any special faith in the methods used to evaluate the "buying public."

4. Understanding humans

Perhaps what most makes Musk a designers' CEO is his capacity for empathy. Empathy, the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others and feel their pain, is design's guiding principle. Everything that Musk does, from creating affordable solar energy to founding the Boring Company to bring cities closer to each other, he does because he cares deeply about people. Musk is an advocate for people and aims to remove longstanding obstacles from our lives using design and engineering.

His approach reminds me of something Marty Neumeier talks about in his book The Designful Company: "For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that focus minds and intoxicate hearts, they'll need to do more than HIRE designers. They'll need to BE designers."

If you know more design enablers, I would love to hear from you about who they are and their qualities. We, designers and our customers, need more of them.

Design the life you love!

How to Get Your Team to Think More Creatively

You've probably been in this situation. You need to get a group of people, your team or a group of customers, to think creatively. Perhaps you're going to brainstorm solutions to a problem or do a co-creation session. Everyone gathers in a meeting room, still preoccupied with the last meeting they came out of or a recent email that needs a rush answer or stressed by the effort of getting there on time.

You need to get this group out of their current funk in to a playful, creative, open-minded mode. How do you do that quickly and with success?

Show them a film.

Films that are beautiful to watch, upbeat and related to your topic in a loose, intuitive manner, can change the collective mood from humdrum to creative in a matter of seconds.

After doing workshops with hundreds of people, I've learned that people are often anxious and ambivalent when they walk into a meeting where they don't quite know what will happen. They need a symbolic entry point to the creative space. A good little film acts as the window to such a magical place.

So next time you're going to do something creative, here is what I suggest--

Find a film. Something that distantly relates to your topic (see below some great suggestions). 2-3 minutes is ideal. Watch it together. Then all you need to do is bridge the film to your topic of conversation. Often this happens naturally--there's usually one person in the team that will say something like, this made me think this way about our project. You continue from there.

Here are my favorite films, Rotten Tomatoes-style, you can use for starters--

1. Powers of Ten

My favorite film is Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten. It is a beautiful example of how you can see the same things differently depending on your vantage point and scale. If half of the room has seen it, the other half usually hasn't. And it is one of those films you can watch 10 times without getting sick of it. It is a great way to help people see something with a bird's eye, holistically, or come really close and see it under the microscope.

2. Cook This Page

Ikea's Cook this Page has captured our imagination since it came out. It is a great tool to show people how you can take something as banal as a recipe and totally reinvent it. It wows people and gets them to think playfully. As a visual thinker I also love the visualization of it all.

3. Chef's Table Episode on Francis Mallmann

These days we start Design the Work You Love sessions with Francis Mallmann from Netflix Chef's Table. Francis Mallmann is a renowned Argentinian chef who left the comfort of his famous restaurants to cook in the wild in Patagonia. He calls himself a "gypsy chef". It is a great example of someone who loves his work and sets the tone for exploring what it takes to find the right ingredients for our own work.

4. Kinematic Dress

When we need to inspire people (users, designers or anyone really) about the power of new materials and processes, we pull out the Kinematics Dress, a 3D-printed gown in motion. The suspense of what's going to happen and the transformation of what looks like powdered flour into a flowing dress is magical. Try it and you will see how ordinary people can come up with extraordinary ideas after viewing the film.

5. Ira Glass

Ira Glass of This American Life on story telling. Watch this when you're frustrated with the quality of what you're doing. Glass talks on video about the gap between your "killer" taste and what you actually do, a gap that can exist often for years. His lesson: do a lot of work to narrow the gap. Inspiring for anyone who is venturing on a new idea, like me and the team at Sound Made Public, as we start our Design the Life You Love podcast.

You can then watch play designer David Shiyang Liu's beautiful version of the interview set to typography.

6. The Happy Film

Stefan Sagmeister's long awaited The Happy Film is now available online. A beautiful and deeply personal pursuit of happiness by the maestro of graphic design. Steven Heller, prolific author and design critic, calls it a "atomic bomb of a film". Perfect to watch alone or as an after hours movie at the office, and to show excerpts for team meetings.

7. Abstract: The Art of Design

When you want to be in the company of creative giants, watch Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design. Illustrator Christoph Niemann is a favorite.

7.5. One of These Three Short (and Funny) Films

These are funny or beautiful (or both) films that are great for the after lunch slump, to get the energy back up:

- This from Bloomberg on the Good Design Issue gets good laughs.

- Fashion films can turn out to be little art pieces. Here is one from OMA for Prada.

- Volvo ad, ABC of Death, by Dorian & Daniel is one of our favorite pieces for laughs. It is also a great primer for our creative tool, wrong thinking.

I always believe that the mood of creative thinking, at least as you enter it, is playful. It needs to be because when you're playing you're not afraid of making mistakes. What better way to set a playful mood than a film.

What are your favorite films that inspire you? I would love to hear from you and watch them.

Design the life and work you love with the aid of some great films!

Thank you Rona Binay, Karen Vellensky, Selin Sonmez, Chris Rawlinson, Leah Caplan and Seda Evis for your favorite films!

How to Make Air Travel Less Painful

I've been traveling a little too much these days. So much that it has become a chore, something I need to do but don't want to do. This is not a great point-of-view, given that most of my clients reside outside of New York. I quickly realized that I needed to think about travel differently. In other words, I needed to redesign the travel I loved.

To me this is a design problem: what are my constraints and how can I think about them differently? So I approached the problem like a design project, starting with the step of deconstructing the concept of travel (the first step of my design process, Deconstruction:Reconstruction) to help break my own preconceptions.

Here is my deconstruction of travel across four quadrants--physical, emotion, intellect and spirit--and how it helped me shift my perspective from problem to opportunity.

Physical

Airports have lost their charm. They're what French anthropologist Marc Augé called non-places, transient spaces where people pass by in almost complete anonymity.

Shift in POV: As I write this, I realize therein lies also the beauty of airports--a passage way where you can watch all the people of the world pass through. Seen in this light, airports are rivers and I can sit at my gate and watch the river pass by--all the people with their weird haircuts, incredible tattoos; people who travel in their pj's with pillows alongside, in their saris, military uniforms, high heels and sandals; big people, tall people, little people, tired people, excited people; people who cry and wrench your heart at departures, and those who cry with happiness at arrivals.

Emotion

The hardest thing about travel is leaving my family. Therein lies the disruption. As Paul Auster put so well, "Whenever I travel, I get thrown off completely. If I'm gone for two weeks, it takes me a good week to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing before." It doesn't help that airplane service is at a new low--any gate announcements looking for people to take the next plane due to full flights makes my hair stand on end.

Shift in POV: How do you get beyond all the negative emotions and anxiety? I complained to my friend Marshall Goldsmith that I travel too much. Goldsmith, who travels non-stop, didn't have much sympathy for me but shared his 2 travel tricks which I have since internalized--sleep anywhere at the drop of a hat, and be happy doing what you love doing anywhere. In other words, stop whining about travel if it lets you do what you love. Now when I travel, I do so with minimum complaining and a box my daughters made for me with little notes to make me laugh along the way.

Intellectual

This is the quadrant that surprised me because I realized that the moment of travel for me is intellectually very rich. I love the bookstores at the airports and pass my time browsing through their books, trying to choose something I'd like. Half of the books I read are bought at an airport and often finished on airplanes.

Shift in POV: Suddenly moving through space in the company of my books doesn't seem bad at all. In fact, this is the time I am free of distractions to indulge in my favorite pass time, reading. Current book bought at an airport: Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene.

Spiritual

This is the quadrant that tripped me up because air travel seems soulless. What can I find spiritually redeeming here?

Shift in POV: I love thinking about this quadrant because it helps me to think of universal truths I might neglect otherwise. The spirit of travel is the people who are waiting for me at the other end, at my destination. Some are clients, some are friends who live where my clients are, some are clients who have become friends, some are people I don't know but who've accepted my invitation to visit while I am in their city. We are face to face, building trust, learning from each other and about each other, solving problems, laughing and talking about our life. They make the whole experience worth while.

This is design thinking or thinking like a designer, holistically and with empathy (in this case empathy for myself) applied to travel. It is intentionally shifting my point of view to turn constraints into opportunities when I can, and working around them when I cannot. With the hope the it will help you think about your travels differently too.

Design the travel you love.