Is Everything Feels Great?

Put a cherry on your work

Idham
3 min readMar 8, 2021

Wouldn’t it be great if we could make our work better by asking one question? This is my experience about asking the right question for the right result.

What if you can (hopefully) create the best effort (and result) of every work?

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Applying this question to your daily basis it’s like putting a cheery on top of your cake, it’s already good but we can make it better. the question is “Is Everything Feels Great?”, simple and straightforward.

“It’s like putting a cheery on top of your cake, it’s already good but we can make it better.”

How I came across it

Back in my journey in 2020, I found a method called “The Checklist” basically it’s a guidance for us to do our work, it’s like a map that guides us and makes sure that we’re on the right track. At the end of my every checklist, I defined “Finishing” and over the months I realized that it isn’t helpful at all, which makes me update it into “Is Everything Feels Great?”.

Why? because I personally (or maybe even us) more excited when being asked instead of facing with generic things that don’t create any excitement at all. When you want somebody to takes care of your baby, do you want it as a robot or as a human?

Why I use it

Photo by Markus Winkler from Burst

I want to maximize my effort on every important work I do, Search the problem by myself before asking for others to do it, this is a kinda extra layer for my working process. Asking this question can also make me happy with the result I did.

And some of the sparks that affect my workflow are

  • It makes me to realized when something doesn’t actually look great, it’s like there’s something wrong with it
  • It gives me the temptation of adding a little effort to my work that turns it out to be wonderful work, remember the cheery on a cake we’ve talked about before?
  • Increasing my mental clarity, because I can even apply this question to my daily routines and realized something that bothers me
  • Updating my work even when it’s already done, if today I ask it into my work and the next day I did the same, then it would be 2x greater, right?

Start with trivia/small things

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

Think about your daily work, let’s say while editing the photos of you hang out with your friends, if you ask the question maybe you could find that “I think the saturation is too high”, “Alex’s face becomes yellow, what the…”, or “maybe let’s crop this object out of our frame”.

You can’t just fix it on your own

Photo by Dee Worrall from Burst

Still and sometimes, apes together strong. Maybe you could find the problem of your work and then update it with your own technique, but everybody is wearing different glasses for seeing things, the birds that saw oceans as a food-supply will different from the birds that saw oceans as a “too much predator, run!”

You can start applying this to almost everything, that’s why there is the word “Everything” in it, use every time you face something. Until when it asks you again, you can just be like “How dare you challenge your lord?”

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Idham

Write about craft, collaboration, strategy, and impact as a designer.