Justyna Dorsz

Productivity

Create designs faster

The process for creating a design is:

  1. Have an idea.
  2. Sketch it.
  3. Draw it properly.
  4. Clean up the lines. Polish.
  5. Add text if needed.
  6. Export to a PNG file. Sometimes you need a few variants.
  7. Submit to your online store.
  8. Add tags and a description.
  9. Share on social media.

That’s a lot of different kinds of tasks. And it always takes a moment to switch from one task to the next one. Instead of making one design and then another one, it’s more efficient to batch similar tasks together.

First, I note down ideas. At the moment I have 9 ideas for designs that I want to create for my new store. Today, I’ve made initial sketches for all of them. Then I will draw them all. After that, export all the designs to PNG files. And submit to my store.

I know from experience that this way is faster. When I focus on just one design, I end up making only that single design during a day. But, when I work on groups of designs, I can make 3 to 5 designs a day.

Roam Research – Templates

I make notes about all the books and articles that I read, about anything useful that I learn. I note down all my ideas, I plan my future projects, I write down notes from courses I take. And while I work I chronicle the process.

For all that I use Roam Research. It’s kind of like my second brain. I wrote a bit about it before.

One feature that I’ve found out about recently is: Templates. When you keep writing the same things over and over again you can use templates to speed up the process. For example, when I read a book and want to add it to my Roam, I create a new page for that book. And then I add notes: the author, keywords, sometimes quotes. Now however I can create a template so that notes for each book follow the same structure.

The format for the template is:

The first line is key: you need a trigger to be able to use your template, and you need to add “#roam/templates” to specify that it’s a template.

I created a new page in Roam called “Roam Templates” to keep all my templates there and added the first template The template is for book notes, the trigger is — “book”:

All the sub-blocks: “Title”, “Author”, etc, are the content of the template.

Now that my template is declared I can use it wherever I want.

I go to another page that I created for the book “Annihilation” which I’ve read recently. To use the template I need to call a trigger, you do that by writing a semicolon twice: “;;”

When I write “;;” I get the list of all my templates. For now, there’s only one template: “book”. I select it, press enter, and my template shows up:

Now I can simply add all the data I want to have here. And then I can use the same template for other books.

Make your first 100 mistakes

Quality doesn’t matter, quantity does. It’s better to do 100 drawings than spend all that time on a single drawing.

Starting a blog is scary, but I knew I would only get better if I wrote a lot. The first 100 designs are going to be awful, get them out of the way as soon as possible. Same with photography:

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

This reminds me of the story about a pottery class. Students who practiced a lot made better pots than the ones who were focused on creating one perfect pot.

Quantity over quality. This is the sort of thing that I need to remind myself of.

Best way to take notes

There is one app that I use every day, many times a day — Roam Research. And I can’t overstate how vital this tool is for me. Roam is a note-taking tool but on their website, they advertise it as “a tool for thought” and they might be right. It certainly feels that the way I see connections between topics changed since I started using it.

I’ve tried many other apps for taking notes like Evernote and Notion. I had high hopes at first but inevitably I stopped using them after weeks or even days. A note talking tool must be, first and foremost, easy to use. If there’s a barrier to taking a note, let’s say if you have to open the right directory and find the correct file, open it, and then add your new note — then it’s unlikely you will take as many notes as you could.

And if we don’t take notes, we forget.

To take a note you open Roam and you already have an empty page with today’s date and you start writing — that simple. In Evernote and Notion, you can create new content fairly easily at first too but after a while you spend more time organizing your notes into hierarchical structures that those apps enforce and less time actually writing.

Creating a link to another note in Roam
In Roam you put brackets around a phrase and this creates a page and links to that page.

This is not a tutorial to Roam, by the way, because Roam doesn’t need one. The only thing that you need to know to get started is that you can put any phrase in [[brackets]] and it automatically creates a page and links to it.

And this is how you create a link to another note in Notion:

Creating a link to another note in Notion
Are you serious, Notion?

If you want to use Notion then don’t even look in the direction of Roam —once you see how easy to use Roam is you, won’t be able to switch to any other tool.

I like Roam so much that I recommend it to all my friends but it’s a surprisingly tough sell, maybe because it’s so different than what we are used to in note-taking apps.

I use Roam but there’s also a completely free alternative to Roam – RemNote.