2017 Review — Did visualising my goals help me achieve them?
Every December/Jan for the last few years I’ve used sketchnotes to visualise my goals for the next year ahead. These are never hard and fast (I’m not too hard on myself to achieve them all!) but I thought I’d take this opportunity, before outlining any new goals for 2018 in the next week or so to look back and reflect on my goals for 2017 and how I did against them. It’s a nice opportunity to reflect on what I did well, what I could do better, and a good review before setting myself some new personal and professional targets for next year.
I usually break my goals down in 3–4 categories, some for my UX work as a consultant at Foolproof, some around my sketchnotes and doodling, and some personal stuff that I’d just like to happen in life in general.
As a result my sketchnotes goals sheet for last year looked liked this:
I’ll move through and look at each section in turn:
UX Stuff
Reviewing this column now, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the core theme around this section of my goals sketchnotes is really to build upon the work I did in order to switch careers into the UX world, and build upon the skills I’ve developed since joining Foolproof a couple of years ago.
To start with… I got promoted to Senior Consultant in Sept which is awesome, and that wasn’t even on the list! Maybe I did hit these steps and that’s what got me the promotion? Hard to tell, because there’s always more I could do, but it’s safe to say I’m very pleased with that promotion and it’s something I’m proud of.
I’ve also, certainly been involved in more design focused projects, the main one (and my favourite UX project so far) being a large complex redesign of a large, international financial services system which really stretched both my research and problem solving skills. This has been the highlight project of this year, but there’s been loads of smaller, but no less interesting work where I’ve had to excercise and learn new skills continually. I’ve had chance to inject visual thinking across pretty much all of my projects and we’ve even been able to start to sell in Sketchnotes to clients as part of our offering which has been awesome.
I’ve also learnt more (for sure!) thanks to the super cool, super smart people around me at Foolproof — I’m really lucky in be in an environment where we have both world class researchers and designers all under one roof. It means for someone who’s sits kinda in the middle like me can learn something new in literally any conversation I have with any of my colleagues.
As for speaking and teaching more, this is something I’d like to think I’ve really worked on this year, definitely my most enjoyable aspect of 2017 has been public speaking more, holding workshops both at conferences and within clients businesses, inlcuding a really great trip to teach at the University of Luxembourg, and spreading the word about sketchnoting to people. I’ve had great feedback from these sessions and really looking forward to doing more of this next year, as it’s been so rewarding.
As for being more confident in my delivery to clients, I’m getting there, depends on the project, and on the client. Still something I need to work on, it’ll be no surprise to people who know me personally that I’m not always comfortable with the lingo of clientspeak and sometimes this affects how I deliver debriefs etc. Getting there though but still something I need to look at improving further next year.
I’ve also seem to have been struck with a bit of a writing bug recently, I put together an article on my 7 favourite uses for Sketchnotes in UX and to be honest I’ve been absolutely blown away by the reception it’s gained. I think sharing knowledge is one of the most important things we can do to support each other in this turbulent times we live in and it’s incredible to be able to play a part in helping others out like this. Definitely going to be doing more of this in the new year.
Overall however I’ve had one of the best years at work in a while, and looking forward to carry on building up my skills and working on and with more cool clients and projects in the new year :)
Sketchnotes and Doodling
It’s getting harder these days to differeniate between my day job and the sketching side of things, they’ve started to compliment each other so much, and even the stuff I draw outside of work informs the stuff I do in it and vice versa.
One of my goals was to add more polish to my notes, and whilst I believe I have this still needs work, two of the coolest things I did this year were to create a sketchnote case study mural for the new Foolproof offices, and to create a sketchnote video for one of our large clients.
As mentioned above there’s aspects of it that I’m really pleased about how it’s worked well with my job, but there’s a couple of really big highlights that stand out for me outside of ‘work’.
Firstly, I made a start on my comic book about my dads adventures as the last remaining eelcatcher in East Anglia, which I called the Eelman Chronicles.
This has been on my mind for several years but I never really had the confidence to try and produce something. This year I made a start and produced 4 issues of the comic, some T-shirt and sticker designs. This has been a really cool side project to work on, and I’m pleased with how it’s progressed (mostly, I could have done more).
It’s true personal stories , hand made and authentic and that’s very important to me, and although I kind of slowed down toward the end of the year this is something I’ll definitely pick up again in 2018. I’m just trying to work on it when I feel motivated and for it not to become a second job as I want to keep the enjoyment of doing it. Keep a look out for a printed comic sometime in early 2018 though! Likewise T-shirts and Stickers have gone down really well, with hipsters from Shoreditch to Singapore wearing T-shirts based on my dad, which is baffling, hilarious and amazing in equal measure :)
Another huge highlight of this year and something I am very pleased about was taking part in the ReasonsTo creative conference Elevator Pitch in sept. This was a fantastic opportunity at a highly respected, and frankly mindblowingly inspirational conference. 14 of us gave a 3 min talk in the hope of being selected by the audience to return in 2018 to give a full talk and it was amazing amongst so many talented artists, designers and creative coders to have won one of the 3 spots on offer.
The entire process was fantastic, we learned a lot, we overcame nerves, we bonded as a team and we got up on a massive stage and all delivered great talks. Really great experience and thanks to the team at ReasonsTo for the belief, assistance and support across those few days, see you next year!
Stuff to Work on.
I’m a work in progress and I always will be, there’s stuff I’d like to do more of, actually no, stuff I SHOULD do more of, stuff I should do less of (playing Playstation will always be a distraction I think!) but I think this is fine, I’m very mindful of not burning out and my time to relax and do nothing is actually very important to me as it helps with my wellbeing.
We need to do some work on the house so we can sell it and move. I need to be more positive at times, or learn to channel the odd occasions when I’m a bit negative back into productivity and positivity. I need to improve my drawing skills and again contribute more to the sketching and UX communities (although got a bunch of things lined up so hopefully I’ll tick those boxes soon enough).
Overall
Overall though I am very pleased with how 2017 has gone, I’ve made good solid progress in several different areas of my life and I see this just as a constant evolution of whatever it is, or means to be Chris Spalton. The plan is to keep going, one step at a time and I think I’ve given myself a firm path to do that.
Looking again at my goals sketchnotes at the top of the article, I did find it useful to reflect back on and aim for those things, and most of them have developed so that’s great, I’ll be producing some fresh ones for 2018 so keep an eye out for those soon.
Most Importantly
Huge thanks to everybody in 2017 (and always) who has worked with me, supported me, invited me to do cool things, asked me to draw anything, bought a T-shirt, downloaded a comic, sat with me and had coffee, got drunk with me or just hung out and talked about life, work, music, and the world. It’s been a great year and I’m honoured to have you all in it, thank you.
