One of the areas in my life that I have been trying to improve on is personal productivity. By personal productivity I mean focusing on current goals, paying attention to things which matter and boost up creative energy.

Every month I re-invent new techniques by studying my own logs and taking inspiration from others. One of the things I learned recently from following talks is focus on creativity everyday

I liked the idea and tried to tap on it immediately, so I started my day focusing learning about Blender, its a tool for 3d animation. The inspiration from blender came after listening to talk from Andrew Price

Andrew Price - Twitter

Andrew is the guys who learned drawing in span of 6 months, and I was instantly inclined to him because quick learners focus on important things first like 80/20 rule. I don’t have inclination towards 10,000 hours theory to master something.

In the morning I was reflecting on my past, the desire to learn 3D was always there and I never paid attention to it. Recently I was listening to one of the talks from Google Product Manager. He mentioned that if a UX portfolio shows things like Virtual Reality than its a bonus, because that person has invested his time in learning latest greatest.

I had a connect the dots moment. Instantly I found this article on reddit.

UX for VR

I believe learning 3d could be good investment, while searching on reddit I also found that this space lacks prototyping tools. Probably if I invest sometime learning and evaluating it may lead to somewhere may be not now, but in future. Who knows?

So I had fun creating a donut and icing on top of it, my son was accompanying me and he was super excited about 3D too.

Considering today is Sunday I thought to write this daily log which will help me carve out next week. So how did the last week go? Last week I hit some blockers, one of the ideas I wanted to pursue was to pause learning and start working on real projects. One of the motivation behind that was that learning and execution can happen at same time. I need to find a customer who is patient enough to go through UX cycle.

I didn’t want to take this decision all of a sudden, this is where I thought that a mentor will be needed. I ended up posting a job in upwork.com. Here is what I posted on Upwork:

I am currently ramping up on UX design and taking courses as well. After a certain period I want to go out and find a customer who can buy my services. Since there is a time to market and educating myself this is my expectation from first mentor-ship session.

1. Understand the learning I have done so far and give me a go ahead or set a milestone to tell when I am market ready.
2. Setting up the portfolio - How many projects I should have on portfolio and specific advice on what I should have on my portfolio.
3. *Any other advice’s on establishing as a freelance UX designer.*

Above three are mandatory, based on how mentor-ship session goes I would be willing to set this up in a recurring interval.

Its been 3 days and I haven’t received a response. I also went to reddit and asked this as a question:

Reddit - Question - Readiness plan for beginner](https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/dgovy0/readiness_plan_for_beginner/)

Apart from that I also reached out to my ex-colleague who is a UX designer. Haven’t heard back from him.

That makes me question how should I plan my next week. There are two things that I have in my hand:

1. Current training plan - Design thinking, Interaction Design and Becoming UX designer.
2. Verify if I am ready to tackle design project if yes than go find out a customer.

For # 2 I am blocked, but that doesn’t prevent me to complete # 1. Last week my training score went down because I am focusing on two things at a same time. I believe I should continue focusing on training and execute #2 in low priority.

Here is what I have decided to focus for week # 42:

1. Continue learning design thinking

2. Finish interviews for case study exercise

3. Document case study as Personas [Optional].

4. Set up personal blog

Some of the learning from this week

1. A question on how to sell your skills - How will you sell your skills to a business owner? - Although I was able to blow his mind that UX gives you ROI, validation before launching product etc but one more round of practice to answer this question will help.

2. Keep your day plan light and lot of creative stuff - This keeps energy high. I believe that higher we vibrate more likely we are going to meet people at similar frequency.

3. Day Architecture - Sounds cool? How many of us actually plan a day well and live it? Mostly when we plan, we become a victim of our plan by doing too much. I guess answer lies in focusing on goals for a month, and achieving that by creating a pressure of time. Pomodoro planners are helpful.

4. Naming blog or company of the future - One of the things I was stuck with is if I am starting my own company of one person what should be the name. It should be a personal name or a particular brand name. One of the thing that I gained clarity is personal blog can be segregated from the company name. Because company blog can be a focused blog but personal blog will mix two different intents. May be I should start thinking about setting up personal blog first. I also liked the idea of setting up the company name as as acronym like - TDC [Tom design company]

You can read discussion I created on Reddit

Need advice : Company name vs Personal Name

That sums up my day and week too :)