The traditional 9-to-5 workday is an artifact from the Industrial Revolution, when efficiency was king and creativity was considered an uneconomical business practice. Although we maintain the official eight-hour business day, in a marketing agency like ours, quality design requires hours of careful contemplation and critical thinking. “Design time” is a complicated concept: time is money, but putting “deadline” and “creativity” together in the same sentence is like pairing peanut butter and tomato soup.
Sitting in an office chair for eight hours addressing emails, answering the phone and staring at the same surroundings don’t always facilitate the best innovative, original ideas. Therefore, modern designers “take their work home with them.”
A lot of us would admit though that we dwell on our work constantly, whether this means early in the morning singing in the shower, at dinner sculpting our mashed potatoes, or, most likely, while we lay in bed next to a pen a paper.
My most successful visions of creativity occur during times when my mind is free to wander. Creativity comes from the brain’s ability to make connections. Because I always keep client projects at the back of my mind, subconsciously searching for the best way to deliver a client’s message, I’m able to draw inspiration from all kinds of unlikely sources I may never have considered at the office.
The net worth of a designer’s work can’t realistically be evaluated within the metrics of a traditional workplace. The constant formulation of how to present a message creatively never stops. We end up able to assign deadlines to our work because we don’t constrict ourselves to only thinking creatively for half of the day, which proves just how valuable we are.