OK, I am famous for treating summertime as if I were still a grade school student; lazy, indulgent, distracted. When you’re a kid with no other responsibilities and the three months ahead feel like they will go on forever, padding around with little direction and no real plans other than to “have fun”, is a perfectly acceptable way to spend the summer.
But when you’re 35 with a business to run and responsibilities to fulfill, the fact is that you don’t quite have the kind of loosey-goosey freedom to just chill.
Lately, I’ve noticed that I’ve been ignoring that fact.
As an example, I mostly stopped working three days before the July 4th holiday. Three days! I just felt like I wanted to relax and read my book and not really look at the computer. (Side note, I did eventually get off my ass and do work on the 3rd and 4th, oddly). Anyway, while I’m always a proponent of listening to your body and mind and taking breaks when necessary, I also believe that we can sometimes make excuses and over-indulge.
Are you guilty of this too?
Sometimes I think we work so stinkin hard, always go go go and then suddenly we hit a wall. It feels like we’ve been moving so much, both our bodies and our minds, that we get to a point where we need to just stop. Not for good, of course. Just for a good few days.
Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe if we stop working ourselves to the point of exhaustion, and we start taking real and true breaks then we wouldn’t have these weird lazy weeks where the thought of doing anything other than vegging out is totally overwhelming so we do little bits of random stuff and nothing all that impressive.
I think I’m writing this blog post to try and make myself feel better. For me, summer started with a big push to stay focused and get on top of all the things that seem to have taken up permanent residence on my task list, but instead the productivity has come in bits and spurts. And I can’t figure out how I feel about that.
Part of me is like, “Who cares. You always work hard, if right now you’re not moving forward as much as you’d like, so be it. ” While another part of me is like, “Hello! You have sooo much to do and every day that you ignore that fact is an extra day of super hustle that you’re going to need to have.”
As I write this I’m realizing that the answer is balance and organization along with some tough love.
I think that we know, in our guts, when we’re lying to ourselves. I think we know when we are indulging in our own laziness and when we are truly in need of a break.
For me, these past few weeks are not a true need to relax, I know that in my gut. They are just me letting myself slack off. And that’s a problem because I will definitely regret it when I’m staring down multiple deadlines at one time.
So, designers, if you too are struggling with the balance of much needed rest versus indulgent laziness, I think the only thing to really do is ask yourself honestly what you need. And if what you need is to get to work and make a much-needed dent in your task list, then you get up and do it. I’m right there with ya.
Lots of love and encouragement,