You can probably design your way to any outcome. But let’s compare coffee and little kids to see.

Why I Believe in Design and Design Believes in Me

The 3 Phases of Design Every Project Encounters

Today it’ll be 85º. When I got to work this morning, I put fresh, hot coffee in a mason jar with a lid and put it in the fridge. Through the magic of good planning, after lunch, it’s a wake-making iced refreshment waiting for me. I’m certain of the outcome, barring power cuts or someone leaving the fridge door open. I’ve designed this care for myself.

Earlier this morning, I made breakfast for both my kids. I do this almost every morning. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they super don’t. They’re two and four years old—food moodiness is par for the pre-K course. I hope that, whether they eat or not, they learn how to care for themselves with a healthy breakfast. And that I love them. I’ve targeted these outcomes, though I’ll try many other tactics to solve for them, too.

So, two cases of design. Two cases of self-care.

If you're solving things with design, you could divide your approaches into short-, mid-, and long-term design. Putting coffee in the fridge? Short-term design. Breakfast with love? Long-term design.

But I think you’ll be walking into the mouth of madness if you try to plan mid-term design. Why? Let me explain with another example.

Let’s say you’re going for a walk. Short-term design is you deciding how to take the next hundred steps. Quick pace? Slowly, so you don’t arrive sweaty? Which path works most efficiently for you?

Long-term design is what point on the horizon you’re aiming for, be it self-care or the building across campus.

Mid-term design happens after your first hundred steps, but before you’ve reached your horizon point. Running late, better pick up the pace. Are you tiring too quickly? Does your friend Sarita want to join you? You pick a direction that intersects with her while still moving toward your destination.

You design the short-term; you design the long-term. But the mid-term designs you. When you arrive in the mid-term zone, suddenly you possess performance data on the first hundred steps, new stakeholder input from Sarita, budget feedback from your tired legs, etc.

Now that your walk is telling you some information, you’re prepared to do another round of short-term design in response. You might walk quickly, but take the stairs to Sarita instead of the long way around. You still have the time (and the legs) to reach your destination. All’s well, though you might try new approaches after reaching your friend.

This is why we at Pathwright work in six-week project cycles. We’ve written about that before. Among other things, focusing on short-term and long-term design at work keeps us from neurotically obsessing over things like quarterly profits or overcommitting at the expense of adaptability.

We know our long-term mission. We design our slate of new projects. We wait for mid-term design to kick in in-between.

Great designers of all kinds welcome mid-term feedback. Mid-term exams? Tweaking the curriculum for next semester? Having the team try a different kind of book for the next company book club? Reframing launch instructions for the next conference? All cases of allowing in mid-term design to collaborate with you.

You could call my fridge coffee trick a “life hack”. I’d just call it good design—figuring out what you’ll want and how to get it before you have to have it.

In four hours, I’ll need cold coffee (long-term). So right now, this hot coffee needs a cold fridge (short-term). If it’s still hot in an hour, I’ll move it to the freezer to cool faster (mid-term). I can’t know what the coffee will need in an hour. I could go crazy theorizing or overcomplicate things (or both, yikes).

The coffee will tell me. Design happens between my needing coffee and what the coffee needs from me.

Please, set yourself a moonshot long-term design goal. And take the next hundred well-designed steps to get there. But don’t obsess over what might happen after that. Embrace the mid-term design coming to you. It’ll tell you what to do.

We couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill we had no way of switching off or even slowing down. Recovering a more natural rhythm of work and rest humans are wired for, here are five benefits of working in 6-week cycles that we can't do without.

During the summer after I graduated from college a sinking feeling began to creep up on me. While I'd readily said "goodbye" to school for good, now I was looking at a seemingly-endless expanse of time ahead of me with no new semesters, long breaks, advancements or graduations to look forward to... just work and whatever I made of it. I like work and making my own path through it, but something about this horizon of unstructured sameness unsettled me enough that I got very close to signing up for more school.

Over the following decade, I got used to the never-ending stretch of time, and we began to build Pathwright as a never-ending series of projects. (Software is never "done".) We'd start and finish projects and then pick up the next. We hit (and missed) plenty of launch dates in no particular rhythm. We tried out many project management tools and methods from kanban boards to project management software to sticky notes and saw marginal improvements.

In other words, we worked pretty much the same way as every other company. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill that we couldn't switch off or slow down. As the product and team grew and projects stacked up, we ran into frequent periods of intense work and subsequent burnout. After a particularly rough stretch of time leading up to launching Pathwright 2, we knew we had to get off the treadmill. That's when we stumbled across this article about how Basecamp works in six week cycles. We've learned a lot from Basecamp over the years and had nothing to lose by giving this method a try in the new year of 2017.

Most new ideas we try on for size work to a degree, and we adapt them a bit for marginal overall improvement. But this idea was not like that: It worked immediately. It worked amazingly. And it's still working.

Now, it's hard for us to imagine not working in six-week cycles that we refer to as "Trails." In addition to recovering the more natural rhythm of work and rest we humans are wired for, here are five benefits we can't do without:

1. Time-boxing projects into six-weeks helps us plan smaller & smarter.

It's notoriously impossible to predict accurate timelines or costs for software projects (and that's true of any multifaceted, creative project). Humans are simply no good at predicting the future. Once we finally accepted our finite planning powers, we gained a tremendous amount of mental clarity and focus from simply limiting our time horizon for projects to "what can we realistically accomplish in just six weeks?"

As for how many projects we plan during one trail, we followed Basecamp's lead and commit to:

⛰ Expeditions: A few bigger projects that will take four to six weeks.

🏞 Hikes: Seven to ten smaller projects that take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

After the first few trails of taking on quite a bit too much, we added a "Notch Day" smack in the middle of the six weeks that acts as a checkpoint to review project progress, share feedback, and help each other edit down projects to even smaller sizes when we can.

2. We get to hit the reset button every six weeks.

While we try to keep projects within the six weeks, we don't stress out if we don't quite make it. Instead, we hit the "reset" button during the two weeks in-between trails.

We call these two in-between weeks 🏕 "Camp weeks" which are a break from focused projects to focus instead on review, exploration, and planning at a slower pace.

Any projects not finished in the previous trail are reframed and reshaped as a new project for the next trail or put on a waiting list for a future trail.

3. There's time to look back, think, and plan.

Our 🏕Camp Weeks in-between each Trail are a welcome respite. We take a slower pace, re-orient ourselves towards our goals and mission, and begin to map out the next six-weeks of work.

Camp weeks not only provide us with a nice break, but also help us zoom out from periods of detailed focus to reflect on our mission, strategy, and goals. This big picture review every six weeks helps us avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing the urgent over long term impact.

4. We have a rhyme and reason for saying "later."

Before we worked in trails, it was more difficult to tell team members and partners with a great idea or pressing need that we'd have to get to it "later." While later is necessary 93% of the time, it could come across as subjective and arbitrary when our only framework for planning was whatever we decided was next in line. Additionally, we spent a lot of time and energy attempting to synthesize all this new feedback with current plans as it came in (which was all the time).

Now that we work in Trails, we can simply share that we'll consider the idea during an upcoming Camp Week and get back with them — and then forget about it until then. While we still have to say "later" to most requests, at least there's a rhyme and reason behind it and our team and customers have all generally found knowing the rhythm of our work reassuring.

5. We get to share more of what we've accomplished.

🏕 Camp Weeks carve out enough time to share what we accomplished in the previous trail with our team and customers every seven weeks. We call this 👩🏼‍🏫 "Show & Tell" and it's become a something we look forward to. It's a bit like a mini-graduation we get to experience together six times a year. We're twelve trails in now, and I'm still amazed by how much our team accomplishes in just six weeks.

If you feel like you're running on a treadmill, experiencing bouts of "sprints" and burnout,  then  it's time for you to try something new as well. We unequivocally recommend giving some form of this work & rest rhythm a try and would love to hear how it works for you.

Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com with thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions.

The 3 Phases of Design Every Project Encounters

5 Reasons Why We Work in 6-Week Cycles

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