The Work / Work Balance
Time will make you money, but no amount of money can buy you time.
A month ago I got home from work in the early hours of the morning, another night where an idea for a pitch snowballed only to be stopped by a lack of coffee and the realisation that we needed to return to the studio in a few hours. Walking through the door drained of what it took to produce meaningful design I had another few hours of work ahead of me, work I took on in good faith, work I was reluctant to do (and this was before the nonsensical amends), work that seemed to drain me of any passion after the day I thought I’d left behind at the studio.
I then sent an impulsive, tired tweet – something I normally try to avoid but this time it felt justified.
New rule: Take on no work unless I would be willing to do it for free
This didn’t mean I was going to start working for free, but everything I chose to take on outside the studio, outside the work I had limited control of, I would only give my time to projects that excited me, that I’d be desperate to contribute to.
I didn’t take myself seriously in the slightest when I first wrote this, I put it down to frustration and tiredness. Then the emails came in, more than any normal day as if it were a test. I found it surprisingly easy to consistently turn down work, it was refreshing – surprisingly refreshing – I’d been awake for only a few hours and it felt like a huge weight had been lifted.
Moving forward two weeks, I fully regained my passion for design. I didn’t have any freelance work on at all – before this would bother me but now I had time, I’d get home from work and read Offscreen from cover to cover, I redesigned my own site, I started learning code to build it myself and I finally stared writing – all things I put off doing for an eternity.
Most importantly I actually started designing again instead of just getting things done. I worked on personal projects, I helped people out on products I actually believed in with well thought out user centred design. I was finally designing for the person again, not for the persons money. I have nothing against marketing but there’s a gulf in making someone want to buy something and making them love using something.
And now, a month of having this new rule change a lot of how I live my life, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to people I’ve always admired in design, the requests for freelance work have turned into job opportunities around the world. The most surprising change of all was how it’s refreshed my work in the studio. Where I was once drained and couldn’t see any benefit in the work I was creating, I now seem to be able to pull the benefits out of everything, creating effective solutions and learning from what used to paralyse my design thinking.
This isn’t a tale of how everything in my life has suddenly fallen into place, I’m no expert on work-life balance and I can admittedly fall into the trap working too hard, too often. Following this process has made design a lot more addictive and walking away for the evening is extremely tough when you care. Throughout this process I’ve been lucky that I have a solid job and been surrounded by amazing people. The circumstances may be that most aren’t in a situation where they can implement this idea, but if you feel like I did, like your career had turned into a job and you want that career back, that love you once had, the passion, the determination to be better. Start working hard on the things you want to work hard on and the rest will come.
