Take a fucking lunch break.
I like to work. Most of my past year has been spent working on a multitude of projects, and there have been plenty of late nights and weekends. But I don’t mind all that. I’ve been able to meet aggressive deadlines and do quality work. So I wanted to take a step back and see what’s been working for me especially well this year and how my learnings may be useful to someone else. These tenets are really common sense, but they’re easy to ignore in practice, especially in a busy city like New York. But I’ve found that the more brutal I force myself to be in abiding by these rules, the more my work thrives.
This isn’t about work-life balance; the design industry and New York overall will always be more skewed toward working than not working. That’s why we’re here. This is just about having a system to help organize the chaos. Everyone has different needs, but this is what works for me.
Seriously, take a fucking lunch break.
In the aggro-charged Valley of Silicon, Facebook’s office walls are plastered with beautiful, screenprinted posters with slogans like “Move fast and break things,” and “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” It’s a cool sentiment if you’re a certain kind of person, but the posters themselves leave out a key aspect of creativity & productivity.
As the Washington Post’s Ellie Krieger reminds us, “You may look more productive skipping lunch, or eating at your desk. But you aren’t.” NPR echoes the same sentiment: “We’re not taking enough lunch breaks. That’s bad for business.”
I couldn’t agree more. To crystallize this thinking, I decided to make some motivational posters of my own (pictured). They’re based on Facebook’s design but with a touch of playfulness from illustrator Yu Luck. I made them for myself to not only remember to have a proper work-life balance, but to remember that a good life is essential to good work.
I see lunch breaks as time-freezing switches. Every work-related issue can be frozen in time long enough to have a rousing debate with colleagues about the latest idiocy in American politics, or the latest trending TV episode, or something equally detached from the work fires to be put out a half-hour later. There’s so much benefit in having a laugh with a friend or loved one, or even getting some exercise in the afternoon. And abandoning the office for a minute and getting outside never ceases to improve my creative thinking and well-being. It’s important for me to emphatically hit the breaks to recharge throughout the day to stay sane, creative and productive.
At a certain point during the year, I was on a particularly busy project and found myself getting into a routine of grabbing a quick bite alone (along with two thirds of US workers) and eventually skipping lunch altogether (along with one fifth of US workers). It didn’t bother me, but looking back on that project, I don’t think it was my finest work. All of the extra effort didn’t translate into results.
I’ve been more vigilant about taking periodic breaks and changing the environment as I’ve come to realize that it’s a key part of my creative process. For me, it’s always useful to see a problem through a different lens and find different creative inspiration. Some of the top composers and artists have sparked up ideas for iconic pieces while walking around outside. As designers, why should we limit ourselves to exist within the confines of a box of concrete and steel as we try to figure out how to create something for people to use outside of its walls?
I am proud to work at a shop that respects creative talent enough to give them the courtesy of a flexible lunch break. It’s legally mandated that we provide lunch breaks and additional breaks. But it isn’t something the law should even need to dictate. Humans are humans, not meat. And we need to eat! And we actually even digest our food better when we’re hanging out and talking to each other in our natural state rather than at a desk or in a droning phone meeting. There are days that are exceptions, but I generally take a fucking lunch break, and my employer and clients respect that.
Call your fucking family.
There will be nights and weeks and months and even quarters when burning the midnight oil becomes necessary. But it’s too easy to let that become the norm across a company culture, and that’s bad for retention, for mental and physiological health, and ultimately it’s just bad for business. And for me personally, it’s important to have a balance. I don’t want my deathbed regret to be not spending enough time with my family, like it is for so many of us.
I’ve been wanting to take a trip to Malaysia, where my mother is from, for a few years. It was so easy to put it off and say, we’ll do it next year. We did that for a couple of years and then one of my last relatives in Malaysia died.
As much as 2016 has been the year of work, I have done what I can to also make 2016 the year of family, taking breaks here and there to visit loved ones and spending quality time with close friends.
When my good friend Kurt was having a baby with his wife, I was worried! They were like family to me, and I was going to be the Godfather for this kid. When her water broke several days early on Monday night just this past week, I stayed in close contact with Kurt to see how things were going. I wanted to make sure that everything was going to be okay, since his wife was just on the verge of an age where there could be potential complications. And I wanted to be there for them no matter what happened.
Around 2 am, I asked him if he wanted company. He said yes, and I headed over to the hospital.
As it was going on, I would run to get Sprite or get some air with Kurt from time to time, and I took photos when the stinker finally came out after 24 hours. My phone and subsequent connection to work had died after a few hours into it, and it was a day that I really couldn’t miss at work, but I missed it anyway. Because family comes first for me.
We were there til 8 pm the next night, and there was a lot of tense waiting but everything turned out okay!
It’s a choice that you should never have to feel like you have to make: Your job or your family. Health and friends and family always come first. And that is always okay.
Fucking do what feels good.
The phrase mandatory team-building activity sounds infantile and conjures up thoughts of doing rope climbing activities and doing something funny with post-it notes. So this should never be mandatory. But it is nice to play hard if you’re also working hard, even to go out as a team and get ice cream on a Friday. Sure, we might need to stay late tonight, but at least a few of us can enjoy this chocolate ice cream as a 3 pm break.
I have talked to clients and internal teams alike about the idea of meeting-free time blocks, and everyone usually understands. We creative types have feels and need our alone time, and time to just be with each other, and time to forget about work in the middle of the day and decompress. They understand that this will give them better business results. When creatives feel good, they create work that feels good. Win fucking win. So why not just fucking do what feels good?
Get the fuck out of here.
Back when I was more junior, I used to hang around the office waiting until I felt allowed enough to leave. I do like to be proactive and create work for myself, for example attacking a problem in a different way after covering off early on an assigned task. But in certain situations, like between projects, there’s nothing to do, and the sun is shining outside. The 9-to-6 (or 9-to-9, or 9-to-midnight…) work day is a fake construct that we’ve built up for ourselves like a Trump wall. It’s far more productive to me to go get mentally recharged or creatively inspired at a museum, a magazine rack or a park than to sit in an office waiting for the boss to leave. And I’ve found that when I empower my design teams in the same way, the quality of the work and dedication of the team improves as well.
I have been fortunate to work at shops like R/GA, Hard Candy Shell and AREA 17 that understand that it’s about the quality of the work. Not everyone is so fortunate. Plenty of shops become reactive to clients as a survival mechanism. But as we know, a slave-driving climate doesn’t help to give clients the work that will be good for their business. There’s something to treating humans like humans and not like meat. Somehow, when there is a mutual respect between employer and employee, it just works. And during the busiest times, that’s when these tenets that I’ve outlined are the most important to remember.
As design leaders, we’re realizing that we need to stop being cynical and trying to beat the system and hit some bullshit quarterly number, and realize that we need to play the long game. Treating employees with respect and having basic human decency will always go further than weeding everyone out until you find grunts willing to eat shit. The most talented people will only eat your shit for so long. And we are so lucky that they have chosen our organization to work with, that they have bought into our message and our goals and our culture. I am always proud to create a culture that shows humans respect by treating humans like humans. And paradoxically, judging by all of the creative firms with a human approach that have been wildly successful, that’s how you hit your number. As Harvard found, “companies that adopt significant environmental, employee, and governance policies grow faster than those that do not.” The triple bottom line is the long game, and the long game works.
The tech sector, with its nootropics and Soylent and lean agile fail-fast ethos, can be a purveyor of the mythology that the most productive worker is the one in a constant state of apparent “work.” People unconsciously see you as more dedicated & dependable if you’re always at your desk. But as Krieger found, the most productive 10 percent of workers were those who took regular breaks that lasted about 17 minutes each. So it doesn’t hurt to remember that the sun exists.
Some people don’t need a lunch break. Some people don’t want to talk to their families. Some people have no emotion and don’t need to feel good. And some people don’t have a life and don’t mind staying at an office even when they have nothing to do there. But for those of us who are different from all that, let’s respect that diversity. Let’s respect each other, and let’s respect ourselves enough to be better.
Bye, I’m going to go call my family now.
