ChangeOrder

18 Minutes

You can lose yourself in the process of creating something meaningful for your client, and in the process, literally lose yourself.

Most of my friends and colleagues know me as a fairly pragmatic character, but over the past year, I have been a somewhat fervent believer of "getting out of your own way" -- creating the space in our creative practice to allow the unconscious, the intutitive, and the poetic to be channeled into your work.

In a business that often bills on time spent ideating and then creating things from those ideas, there is always a strong urge to try and quantify every last dribble of work splashed on the page, marrying Ford-factory-like precision to the creative act to ensure maximum throughput on each finely tuned engine (read "designer"). This is the curse of every businessperson who weds themselves to creative industry. The cows are in the pasture, ruminating on grass. Holler at them all you want, but they won't make the milk any faster, growth hormones be damned.

This morning in yoga class, our instructor was focusing on the seventh chakra, the seat of all the other chakras in our body--where true consciousness and intuition illuminate the bodymind like the lumens projected on a television screen.

"It takes 18 minutes of sitting to reach a meditative state," she said at the start of class, and as we progressed through a set of asanas, we would pause to sit, breathe, and let that screen of the seventh chakra slowly clarify, pushing space aside to allow us to experience life as it is, unmediated.

After yoga class, I couldn't help but reflect on my own struggles with time and space in my daily work. Time was necessary to reach the most artful conclusion; space to explore the options before me and drive down the right path. Neither of these dimensions are linear. Neither tolerate mediation. It's very hard for most businesspeople to enforce space for play, and feel confident that the play will lead to something that can be quantified, then sold. Sheer unburdened creative thought, with no sense of utility or application, must be like arsenic to the accountant. Creativity is ambiguity, which is the enemy of economy.

I'd like to disabuse their objections, stow the calculators away, and put forth the following postulate -- that without unburdened play focused on the self, followed swiftly by focused attention on a design problem, clears space in the mind for your self to engage with the work at hand. I think it's one of the few ways to truly inspire the spirit of humanity that infuses design work for paid clients with that little hint of soul.

So next time you're in a situation where you're asked to exceed what you think you can accomplish as a creative, set a timer for 18 minutes and meditate on whatever comes to mind.

During that period of time, you can't hunt through books for an inspiring design, or read your e-mail, or talk with a coworker as a quick break from the stress. Place a pencil in your hand, a sheet of paper on the desk, and turn off your mind.

You aren't being creative. You aren't working. You aren't solving a problem. You are definitely not distracting yourself from the work. You're letting you happen.

This window of being in the midst of doing, even when the stakes are so high that you're losing sleep, is where you can most strongly assert your humanity. Do not be sucked into the feeling of self-sacrifice that punts the life right out of meaningful creative labor. You must give yourself willingly -- but only after giving yourself space to be yourself.

Dirty Little Deadline Tricks

Here's some dirty tricks I've seen used to get solid work out of designers, and have been used on me in the past. But I don't recommend using them. You'll see why.

Go ahead, take as many hours as you want. Within a ridiculously tight timeframe.

I've worked at some agencies where you had free reign to bill as much time as you wanted to your live projects. The rub was that you only got a few days for what should take weeks. It's a dirty management trick: the shorter the project schedule, the more likely you'll take a profit on the project. So squeeze it out of the creative staff.

Hello, designer. Clear your deck so your design time doesn't get chipped away. Focus, focus, focus. We will keep you out of meetings, push off your other projects, and bring you food to eat. But you only get two days to do those three logos. With color studies. And recommendations for look and feel on two brochure concepts.

Sometimes designers forget, when you're juggling a ton of projects, that sweeping everything aside and focusing tightly on one single problem can exponentially improve your work, especially when you're working with a tight team that meets every hour or two to compare notes and inspire rapid progress.

I've seen great results come out of this approach. But also spectacular failures. And the failures would often happen when management got greedy and did this to the same designer over and over again, since they hadn't grumbled that it was unfair. They would also happen when staff got "nickeled and dimed" with small tasks from other live projects. Without enough clear space to focus, there really isn't enough time to succeed without dragging into evenings and weekends. And who wants that?

Every deadline is equally important. You can't miss any of them. Or else.

Some designers respond well to this lie. Others have it used on them so often that they start to see through it.

What's useful, when working through a project schedule, is knowing what deadlines are somewhat arbitrary and which are crucial to a project's success. Time can then be redistributed to ensure no one gets crushed.

What does a designer hate to hear? That they've lost time on their luxurious design schedule because of something they can't control. The client needs a few days to forge a new business strategy, but the publication date for the ad won't change. Your vendor needs two weeks to produce your beautiful design, and can't give you any wiggle room to assure quality. The testing plan for your Web site is forcing a few late nights, because your testing resources have a fixed schedule and if you miss your window, you'll lose days on your schedule.

Knowing when to negotiate is critical. This is a matter of quality of communication, and shared values across your company -- that you won't make a staff member or team fully pay for an internal mishap or a client's revised needs. Time is money, and this is where it can be appreciated.

Our internal project deadline is just as important as a client project. No leeway here.

Personal and internal project deadlines should always be somewhat flexible, within reason. Here's why.

There's a distinct path your design will take on a trip through your studio or agency, through their company and their partners and focus groups and testing. Sometimes your designs even make it out into the world. But the ones that really shine above all the others rarely appear without, say, a creative brief, some kind of rudimentary competitive analysis, research, and an understanding of the psychology of your audience.

The same thinking applies for internal work. Many designers and agencies think they can step around their client-facing processes to do a task because it's "for themselves." This is a fallacy. It will require just as much time, or even more, to negotiate a project through your own internal politics. This is the time that we usually sit around and wait for client feedback on our paid work. While we wait, they're working hard, reviewing the design and getting feedback from key stakeholders. In an internal project, we have to deal with that stakeholder feedback firsthand. This takes more time and energy.

There should definitely be strong general deadlines for internal work, especially when it results in something that needs to be delivered to an external vendor by a specific time. But there always needs to be more room to negotiate timing than a traditional client project.

That is, unless you only have two days to do those three logos. See above...