The Value of Doing Nothing
By: Zachary Styles
Tags: Burnout, Productivity, Journal, Taking A Break, Stress

The sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can save our creative brains from fizzling out; because it won’t be just our bodies that break, but our ideas as well.

Blind faith

I think it’s hard to know when to switch off as a creative. This isn’t just the case for creative professionals, but creative people in general. We don’t do what is usually considered a normal job. There’s a lot of stigma towards the creative worlds because results aren’t always tangible. You don’t always see a direct return on investment or seeing exactly how 2+2=4. Instead, what you see is x+y=56, and often we have no real and unequivocal ideas of what x or y are exactly. We just know they create 56 and we often leave it at that. X and y, however, are the mysterious realms of creativity that we dive into to create what we create.

Because we don’t always know how they work, we spend a lot of our mental energy on trying to figure them out. And it’s draining. Creatives are often pressured externally by those who don’t understand the creative world, who try to put us into square holes when we’re amorphous pegs if anything. Sometimes it works, but usually, it doesn’t. And so we try to figure it out ourselves, not always with much success.

Burn baby, burn

Creativity is also really hard to pin down. To find that flow and stay within it long enough to create something magical. We have dry spells and wet spells, and we never really know how long each of them is going to last. So often what happens is we keep our heads down and graft like there’s no tomorrow.

“I have some time to do that thing I’ve been putting off, let me just do that quick while I’m in the zone.”

There’s nothing wrong with thinking like this, but there’s a limit we don’t always see. Before we know it we’ve gone too far and we start to burn out. Zone after zone, we think we’re being productive but we’re withering away our creative reserves.

Maya Angelou is attributed with a well-known quote:

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

This is true, undoubtedly. But this insight is only useful when you’re not using creativity enough, but what about when you use too much? What happens when you can’t think straight about anything because you’ve used all your energy to solve creative problems and create beautiful things? What then? Then you have to switch it off for a while.

Like your laptop that’s been getting so hot on your lap that you can feel it burning through your jeans, our brains are doing the same thing. We tolerate the burning sensation because, “I’ve just got a few more things to do,” and before we know it we’re practically flinging the thing across the room because we can’t tolerate it anymore. Now you have no choice but to let it cool down to avoid it exploding.

Our brains do the same thing, it just doesn’t feel like a burning sensation. Instead, we experience depression, anxiety and angry outbursts, none of which are pretty if you’ve been on the receiving or the giving end. It’s not always our fault though, it’s our decision-making processes running on fumes and lashing out at the smallest things. We run ourselves down.

Stop trying so hard

This is why we need to take a step back from things every once in a while. As creatives, we don’t always like stepping back because we fear that will bring on a dry spell. But, if done the right way this is the opposite. You’ll be cracking eggs in the frying pan on a Sunday morning and you suddenly think of the most beautiful tapestry you’d love to create, and it has nothing to do with eggs. Or maybe you’re reading a book about whales and you come up with a campaign idea for your client who runs a toothpaste company.

I don’t think we have to visit creativity seminars when we switch off the creative work for a while, or watch documentaries or read books on how to restore our creativity. We are creative already. We just need a break.

Nothing makes space for something later

This article comes as somewhat of an unplanned Part 3 to my recent series on taking breaks. After forcing myself to take a break, away from connectivity and any pressing work, I realised I was tired, burnt out and feeling like shit. Part of me itched to get back to work so I could feel productive again like I was doing something valuable with my time, but another part told me I was lying to myself. I needed more of a break than I thought I did. I needed to do nothing for a little while longer.

As I’ve found, doing nothing, has given me a chance to see things a little differently again. To not have 40 Chrome tabs open and 3 Adobe apps running the background, but rather to shut my laptop down when I’m not using it and get lost in a video-game storyline. To not feel pressured to come up with a creative idea or draw something worthy of selling, but just to be.

Nothing gives you perspective, because it lets you take a step back from all the busyness. It lets you look at what you’ve been doing, and then to audit it. It gives you the opportunity to evaluate whether it was the right or wrong thing to do. Without a small audit every once in a while, you may find yourself powering down a path that’s not good for you anymore. And your head is so deep in it you can’t see the forest for the trees anymore, you’re too busy focusing on the leaves crunching underneath your feet.

Doing nothing is valuable not because it’s not productive, but because it is. Being productive doesn’t mean being busy, and it definitely doesn’t mean throwing yourself around blindly. It means doing the right thing at the right time that contributes to your endgame. Doing nothing is the yin to the yang of our inherent busyness. One cannot be sustained without the influence of the other. The sooner we acknowledge that the sooner we can save our creative brains from fizzling out; because it won’t be just our bodies that break, but our ideas as well.