Focus Your Efforts Where You’ll Have the Greatest Impact

Misplaced Effort Leads to Burnout and Resentment

I have seen two mistakes repeated by every designer I have ever worked with:

• They burn themselves out by trying to work on everything
• They spend too much of their time working on low-impact work

These two mistakes go hand in hand. If you treat all work as equally deserving of your time and attention, you will burn out sooner or later, guaranteed. When I tell this to junior designers, they often balk at the idea. No, everything they work on will receive the care and attention it deserves, thank you very much. And, without fail, these people burn out, and often become resentful of the amount of work they have been handed.

Additionally, when designers decide that all work requires their same degree of attention, they turn themselves into bottlenecks that slow down the work. The last thing you need is to be the one who slows everything down; it impacts not just your reputation, but how your coworkers perceive your design in general. I have spent many years of my career overcoming the poor reputation left behind by designers who proceeded me.

Here are some truths that every designer needs to understand:

• People hire you for outcomes, not outputs. Your value is in results, not rituals.And when you have limited time and resources, as all humans do, you must make some hard decisions about the most practical path to creating the biggest impact.
• No single process works in every context. You must adapt your process to your constraints, stakeholders, and environment.
• Your most powerful lever is where you spend your time. Impact comes from ruthless prioritization, not pouring equal effort into everything.
• Putting time into the wrong things breeds mutual resentment. When the work you sweat over doesn’t materially improve outcomes, you become the bottleneck. You're viewed as a bottleneck and a nuisance. You, in turn, will feel unrecognized for your efforts.

The Unknown-Risk Framework

I have a simple framework that I have used throughout my career to cut through the fog of competing priorities and help myself, and my teams, focus our attention where it actually matters. It’s simple, powerful, and brutally clarifying when you apply it honestly.

I map my work across two spectrums:

• Known ↔ Unknown: Do we understand what’s required?
• Not Risky ↔ Risky: What happens if we get it wrong?

How to Use the Unknown-Risk Framework to Prioritize Your Work

1. Draw a 2x2 grid. Table the vertical axis Unknown (top) and Known (bottom). Label the horizontal axis Not Risky (left) and Risky (right).
2. Plot your current and upcoming initiatives on this grid. Take some thought and identify where each of your initiatives belong. It's important that you be honest and accurate with your assessment.
   1. Known work is clear, scoped, and predictable. You understand what needs to be designed or built, even if it’s new to your product.
   2. Unknown work lacks clarity. Requirements are unclear or undefined, user needs or behaviors are unclear, you're making use of a new or unfamiliar technology, or you’ve never worked on a problem like it before.
   3. Not risky work has low fallout if mis-implemented.
   4. Risky work carries serious consequences for mistakes. This could include legal exposure, lost revenue, compliance implications, and negative customer perception.

Top Priority: Unknown / Risky Work

Strategy, innovation bets, market shifts, foundational redesigns

This is where your expertise is needed the most. Unknown/Risky work combines high ambiguity with high consequences. No one is aligned on what needs to exist, how it should work, or what the right answer even looks like, but everyone knows that getting it wrong will hurt.

This quadrant determines the trajectory and strategy of the work. For some organizations, success or failure in this quadrant will determine whether your company will still exist in two years.

This is the deepest leverage a designer can provide. Spend your best time here.