the willpower of designers

Using Designing Skills to Design Your Day

Does being a good designer mean you’re better at planning things? The realistic answer would be “not always” but I think it should be that way. If a whole circle of people rely on you to design the next great thing but you can’t even design how your own day unfolds, it might mean you just love designing but don’t have much willpower or that you’re not a good designer at all. Maybe not though!

Ironically, this viewpoint adds and in some ways goes against the point I was trying to make in a previous blog post: Why designs don’t always go as a planned.

When you sit down at your drawing table and design something, you’re using the same part of the brain that someone like David Goggins or Jocko Willink, figures known for their supreme willpower, use when they sit down at the breakfast table and plot out what their day is going to look like. They have to visualize things, plan what’s going to go where, and it’s no different than designing a sweater in my opinion.

Maybe if you’re a designer with bad willpower you’ve been doing yourself a disservice your whole life by lying to yourself. You might tell yourself you have no control over your actions, so you procrastinate when you should be working. Stop lying to yourself about this! Realize that if you’re able to design anything, you’re able to design the perfect day for yourself.

I hope this information is helpful.