Studio Missive #8

Happy Friday my friends! This is perhaps a little late, but the dog days of summer have been on my mind this week. The weather might have cooled in the northern hemisphere, but fall has not yet found our doorstep.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Noah Kalina put out a video about the dog days of summer and navigating burnout or slow creative seasons. In the video, he calls his dad, who gives him some life advice about how to avoid burning out. So much of the advice is about meditation. Going outside. ​“Breathing the free air again,” so to speak. Somewhat related was a Harvard professor’s advice about embracing boredom so you finally start asking the right questions, and processing your life and your work. (“Put your phone away. Your brain wants you to pick it back up… That’s normal. That’s addiction.”) In another related video, Matthew Encina shares how he keeps his creative juices flowing, dedicating several minutes to hobbies that keep him exploring and having fun.
2. Maybe the path out is the art of dailiness. Designer and educator Michael Beirut shares a challenge he gives his students to help them get out of a rut: ​“do one creative act you can repeat for 100 days”. Or, in the words of Annie Mueller, ​“ritualize anything”. When COVID started in 2020, and we were all locked down, I played thirty minutes of Animal Crossing every morning for months. I did some of the best creative work of my life in that period of time. I’m not saying it’s because of Animal Crossing, but I’m not saying it’s not because of Animal Crossing either. But we all need a way to get out of our heads. (Meditation might be a better approach.)
3. LEGO gets fans to submit ideas for new products. Here’s my favourite in a long while: a LEGO iMac G3. I would genuinely buy this.
4. A 7,000-person choir sings Black Sabbath’s ​“Paranoid” in Toronto. This was shockingly beautiful, and made me realize that I had never considered these lyrics before. (Via Kottke)
5. Disney released a huge map of the Star Wars galaxy, which answered a bunch of questions I didn’t know I had. It also raised others. Apparently there’s a part of the galaxy in the Outer Rim labeled as Hutt Space, but Tatooine was nowhere near it. So what’s with the Hutt presence on Tatooine? Some sort of alien gangster expansion? Anyway, the map has me tripping and coming with my own little Star Wars theories in my head, which is how I fell in love with the whole stupid franchise as a kid.

What are you working on this week?

I am in my own dog days of summer: work is taking longer than I think it should. I have a pile of unedited family photos of my new baby niece on my hard drive that my family is waiting on, but there has been no time in the past two weeks to process those even. I am in the middle of working on some landing pages for this website, but by ​“in the middle of,” I mean I have written my todo list in Notion and waved at the project from a distance while I work on client projects. 

Despite (or perhaps because of) a lack of time and an abundance of work, progress is being made in mere inches instead of miles.

At the end of the day, my job is basically to set text, images, and information hierarchies on dynamically resizing canvases that respond to a user’s command and inputs. It’s not a difficult job. It shouldn’t take so long to finish something. Right?

I take some relief in knowing that I am not alone. Friends of mine have said the same thing this week. Other business owners I know have also said something similar. Without prompting, each client this week has said the same thing to me, but in different words.

Is it the dog days of summer, or is something in the water?

Perhaps it’s time to meditate. To go for a walk in the woods without a phone. I haven’t had time to play guitar for a while. It’s probably time to pick one up and jam along to some Led Zeppelin. To have fun again.

If this resonates with you, my hope for you in the next week is that you get enough distance from your work and from yourself to get un-stuck.