Work hard - Play hard

Today I want to talk about something I struggle a lot with, hoping to understand it better while writing about it and maybe get a suggestion from you, as it’s something many people can relate to: work-life balance. 

Creative life

Have you ever found yourself taking notes on the phone in the middle of the night or getting distracted while watching a movie by thoughts about your current project? Then, it’s easy to pass from a thought, a random idea, to actually working in a time you could have dedicated to have fun or relax, leading to a continuous blurring of lines between work and personal life. As creative people, it’s not easy to turn off our working minds and many of us probably wouldn’t like to. I think a lot of great breakthroughs actually came to us while doing other things and the fact that our brains want us to think about work is often a sign that we indeed love our job. 

This is what makes everything hard. I know I want to find balance but I can’t even define what balance means for me, and probably you can’t too. I want to be able to rest and relax, without working all the time. But I also want to be effective in my work and have a lot of ideas. I want to concentrate on the video game I’m playing without feeling the urge to study it all the time. Furthermore, as a student or while looking for a job, we have the impulse to always work, build our portfolio, practice, learn, etc.. This is yet another thing where it’s hard to find the balance because I don’t know where the balance lies.

That said, what can help us?

Balance

The first questions we should ask ourselves are:

• Why should we aim for balance?

• What does balance mean for us?

These are hard questions, but I think the answers lie in what makes us capable of doing a good job and living a happy life. A balance between work and personal life will obviously lead to a less stressful life, but we shouldn't forget that it can also help us fuel our creativity. Relaxing and having fun can give us a fresh perspective, and we can harness all the random thoughts that come to us at the right time, when the moment to work comes. Scheduling can help us fixate the right time blocks to avoid blurring among work and life as much as possible.

Another important help comes from training our creativity (as I talk about here). Indeed, when starting a creative career, we think that we have to wait for inspiration to work. So of course, when inspiration comes, we are tempted to leave everything and work. Instead, if we learn to ignite our creative energy at will, inspiration becomes something less fundamental and can’t force us to work. 

Therefore, minimizing stress in life and maximizing our work performances can be our goal, we don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. Of course, small sacrifices are to be made in some cases. As we continue working, depending on our phase in life and the projects we are following, we should understand what balance means for us in that moment and schedule our hours accordingly. After all, life is what happens when we are busy making other plans, so there is not a single effective recipe that works every time. As always, I think the secret lies in being intentional and mindful about how we spend our time. If you want to work, it’s important to take pauses, but you shouldn’t get distracted. If you want to have fun, try to really have fun, concentrating on what you are doing. 

Ciao!

That’s all for today, this week, let’s try to be mindful about how we spend our time, without forgetting to spend our time having fun. After all, art is about life and games are about fun. If we don’t experience new things, what will we design about?