Creatives are Pressured to Deliver, Yet Constantly Interrupted

This post was submitted by Wrike, a 2017 MAX partner. We’d like to thank all our 2017 MAX partners who help make the conference possible.

When Kristina, a graphic designer in San Francisco, first logs in to her work computer for the day, she heads to her to-do list to check what needs to be done. Then she launches Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to work on her vector illustrations or web design mock-ups. Thus begins her day-long marathon of switching between tools.

Throughout the day, as she finishes a design, she hits Alt+Tab to switch between her Adobe tool and her browser-based work management tool to ensure she’s completing her most important tasks first, or to check client feedback on newly submitted designs.

It’s a table tennis game — bouncing from one app to another to keep track of work. And it’s a huge distraction for Kristina and many others like her.

“I Could Produce More If There Were Fewer Distractions!”

The research firm Oxford Economics surveyed 1,200 employees around the world to ask about work distractions. They found that employees rank the “capacity to focus on work without interruption” as their top priority, even above perks such as day care, free food, and the ubiquitous ping pong table.

Furthermore, according to the survey, managers felt their employees were well-equipped to deal with distractions at work. No surprise that less than half of the employees surveyed agreed with the managerial point-of-view.

Another study conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) found that:

• 85% of creative professionals say they’re under pressure to develop assets and deliver campaigns faster
• 71% say they need to create 10x more assets than previously in order to support the diversity of channels
• 76% agree that personalization is driving the increased need for assets

This constant need for more deliverables isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s a reality everyone in the creative and marketing industries has to deal with. The big problem is how to keep producing such high volume while juggling so many tools and browser windows.

Integrating Tools: Think of Your Work Apps as a Team

With many online tools freely releasing public APIs, it has become much easier to build virtual bridges between formerly isolated software.

Services such as IFTTT and Zapier’s entire raison d’etre is to connect your apps so everything plays together nicely.

And software companies themselves are seeing the need to create integrations between their products and the work tools that their customers are already using.

Hence the various collaboration points built into Adobe Creative Cloud, where the ability to find a stock photo, for example, license it, and edit it, can now all be done without leaving the Creative Cloud environment.

Today, Kristina uses Wrike for Marketers, with the Wrike Adobe Creative Cloud Extension that allows designers like her to access Wrike tasks from within Creative Cloud. This means she doesn’t have to keep a browser tab open in order to check on her to-dos or the status of an approval. She can simply click a menu item and never have to leave the Adobe workspace.

Not having to navigate away from her Adobe environment means Kristina no longer has to interrupt her flow. It means fewer distractions and more chances to focus on producing quality work — the work she was hired to do.