I used to live in an apartment. Across from the couch sat the HUGE (TVs were smaller then) 32" Panasonic television. To the right, my HUGE (monitors were smaller then) 19" CRT monitor. 90's beige. Bigger front to back than side to side. I did all my work on that monstrosity. And by work, I mean fumbling meandering. This apartment was the last place I lived before I started my design career, and the path to getting a foot in the door was via Windows XP and my crusty computer. That little workstation acted as an unread notification every time I sat on the couch to watch TV or play my brand-new copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It was the opposite of "out of sight, out of mind", since I had to hide behind the shower curtain with the bathroom door shut to avoid locking eyes with it from across the room.
At the time, I was figuring out how I wanted my adult life to look. The ink on my diploma was already fading, and even though I was working full-time, it wasn't related to my field of study. I knew I wanted a creative career, but that's where the certainty petered out. "How does one land a career in the arts?" I thought to myself, coming to grips with the fact that they glossed over the details of that stuff in art school. One thing I did learn is having a portfolio is a good start, so once I committed to continue pursuing a creative career path, that was the goal.
My portfolio coming out of school was passable, but it was all photography work. This makes sense. My degree is in photography. But I wanted a career making stuff like this:
This presented a small issue. Just a little nuisance, really. I had zero things in my portfolio that matched the kind of work I wanted to do. The creative fields aren't like the average job. You don't draft a resumé detailing your skills and experience and have the hiring manager skim it as they daintily dip the bottom edge into the gaping maw of the paper shredder. By contrast, art directors have only one way to evaluate if the work you produce will match the job they're hiring for: by looking at work you've actually done already. When looking for your first gig, this is very chicken-and-egg.
"How do I...I haven't done any professional work yet...but you need to see what work I've done...but I haven't done any...I need to lie down.
This is utterly absurd but it comes with a tremendous silver lining. Since the most important thing is the work in my portfolio, I can (and should) fill it with the exact type of work I want to do. Yes, my degree is in photography, but if my portfolio is full of incredible packaging design or logos or comic book illustrations, that's the kind of work I'll be hired to do. Imagine that concept in other fields. Imagine getting your degree in English literature and as you're stepping off the curb outside the school to embark on your exciting new life, you rub your hands together and think, "Right...let's go start my career in marine biology".
In reality, this happens all the time. How many people do you know whose career matches up neatly with what they studied in college? Well, if you're still in school I guess the number is zero, but it won't grow much higher as you get older. The difference in the creative fields is the ability to show your skill upfront before interviewing. And if you have skill and persistence, and you're not a terror to work with, you'll get the work.
So my first order of business was to make a list of fake assignments. Each assignment would have a shallow design brief with some prompts to get me started and the finished product would end up in my portfolio. The first few ideas came pretty easily. Design a DVD cover for a short film my roommate was making. Design a book jacket that could use one of my photos. Design a gig poster for an indie band. I brought my sketchbook on the bus to jot down ideas on the way to work. This is going well, I thought. Just look at all these ideas. And when I got home from work, I promptly sat down...on the couch. I somehow didn't feel compelled to turn any ideas into started work, let alone finished work.
What's happening here? Why was this so hard? Well...
When you spend most of your time loafing, the simple act of jotting down a list feels like significant progress. It isn't. Which is a shame. It's a shame your brain tells you lies about reality, though I suspect it's for good reason. Such lies likely protect us from constant existential paralysis and debilitating depression. And while making a list doesn't qualify as significant, it does qualify as progress. The list acts as the fantastical ideal, however unreachable it is, and it gives us a benchmark to measure our perception against pesky reality. Last weekend I had a to-do list with twenty-two items. I completed four. Insanely, I still almost believe I could have checked every box if I wanted. Hefty delusions aside, there is something interesting that happens when you make a habit of getting a few things actually done every day.
In paying closer attention to what motivates me, I notice there's a sliding scale of attention directly related to how we spend our free time. Making the list (as opposed to completing the list) feels like progress only when surrounded by copious amounts of dicking around. We all spend our free time enjoying various combinations of activities, hobbies, projects, errands, and entertainment. But the spectrum of things worth spending time on ranges wildly, from things you should rarely do (if ever) like get black-out drunk at a friend's party to things we could all do more often like volunteering in our community. I pulled those examples out of my ass, by the way. Maybe if you're a psychopath they're reversed for you. I don't know. Regardless, our attention span grows based on the things we spend the most time doing. And the inverse is true as well - the opposite end of the "worth doing" scale becomes more intolerable as our habits crystallize. Thus, if I’m in the habit of getting a lot accomplished, the list-making aspect becomes a footnote in the process as opposed to the achievement itself. My tolerance for productivity expands leaving space for more potential to-dos. By the same token, my tolerance for things that detract from that productivity contracts.
I call this the inverse attention span. As we form habits around what we spend the most time doing, the amount of time we're willing to tolerate away from those things shrinks. The nature of the activities becomes almost immaterial. Using my old apartment as an example, when I was spending 90% of my time on the couch, the computer and all its potentially worthy activities tugged at 10% of my attention. Occasionally I'd sit down and try to get some work done, but the couch tugged at a much-harder-to-ignore 90% of my attention. At this point a logical argument comes to mind: "Obviously you spent more time on the couch. The computer represented work and the couch was play." But remember, this is all about habits. A more recent example reveals an opposing trend:
This year I cut my YouTube viewership significantly to make room for more worthy things like writing and drawing. The ratio is now 90% work to 10% play, but my tolerance holds true to the percentages, not the activities. I can tolerate spending more time on creative output because those are the habits I'm cultivating. Conversely, I can barely watch one YouTube video in its entirety without getting severely self-conscious about being unproductive.
Last year I watched hundreds of hours of YouTube and published precisely zero essays and four drawings. I felt guilty, shameful, and often anxious about this. I missed writing and drawing. Six weeks into this year and I've watched only one or two hours of YouTube while writing and drawing every day. And I always run out of time before I'm ready to stop. I still spend 90% of my time on one and 10% on the other. The difference? This year I have no guilt, shame, or anxiety about how I spend my time. I don't miss YouTube.
Look at your time-spent-on-worthy-things ratio. If your smaller number makes you feel guilty, swap 'em for a month. See what happens.