140 - Inertia

What this episode covers

Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED What happens when you do nothing? What really is the effect of inertia? Music and links from this episode Stop to Start Over by Artofescapism Some Bad Joke by Monplaisir Cherry Dump Cake by half cocked Line-by-line notes Yesterday’s episode about doing nothing got me thinking Funnily enough, about doing nothing It got me thinking a little bit deeper about it doing nothing The effects of it And how it impacts your life Or, as the dictionary puts it, inertia. This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC As a designer Especially as a young designer, or a learning designer Doing just enough isn’t anywhere near enough The competition is too large The amount of skills you need to learn is too lengthy Doing a design course, or just turning up 9-5 at your job Isn’t going to cut it if you want to become an amazing designer, or even any more than an average one Really early on in my design education I realised this I read magazines like Creative Review and Grafik, and every day I was exposed to amazing design work I realised if I was going to compete with anybody in those magazines I had to work harder than them Or at least as hard as them And after reading interviews with these designers in those magazines I knew that they didn’t turn up on a morning and leave at tea time, and never did anything else These people spoke of always thinking about design And if they got an idea in their head, no matter what time it was, they’d pursue it, and see where it went That’s why inertia is weird to me That’s why doing nothing is weird to me Doing nothing has been the exact opposite of my personality for the last 12 years People might call me a workaholic But when you’re a designer, or anything else for that matter If you really love what you do, and you do it as a hobby as well, does that make it a job? Sometimes I do design work that I don’t like, or that doesn’t turn out like I hoped We all have jobs like that, everything you do can’t be a masterpiece after all But I’m always working on my masterpiece in my spare time My next side project piece of design that will be absolutely amazing, honestly And that nobody else has a say in other than me I guess you could call that art, but lets not get into that argument today Maybe you’re not the same, but I find inertia contagious I find if I do nothing for even an hour, I don’t want to do anything for the rest of the day If I want to exercise on an evening after work And I come home and don’t do it immediately, I won’t do it for the rest of the night either If I have an evening off doing work or design or something productive, it stops me doing things the day after I think productivity is some kind of weird habit, or a muscle that you train If you don’t regularly train yourself to be productive You don’t get productive If you regularly don’t do anything, you continue not to do anything Obviously, not doing things and relaxing is good sometimes, as I spoke about in episode 139 But to get anything done over a long period of time You’ve got to go get things done And you’ve got to keep getting lots of things done To build up a habit of getting things done MUSIC This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess Music featured in this episode was: Stop to Start Over by Artofescapism Some Bad Joke by Monplaisir Cherry Dump Cake by half cocked For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to …/ep140 If you want more updates about my podcast, follow me on Twitter at craigburgess I’m back tomorrow Support Ask a Designer Anything Ask a Designer Anything Website Twitter (@craigburgess) Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook Leave me a review on iTunes