Heya friendos! It’s a short one today. Just like me, a lot of creative folk struggle with burnout. In today’s piece, I want to briefly touch upon how I experience burnout. We’ll get into crossing the line between hobby projects and work.
How Am I Doing?
Last Thursday, I found myself staring at the wall while trying to work. I was attempting to fix some bugs and my mind wandered completely off-track every time I started up Godot. For me, restlessness like that is an early sign of burnout. I checked my time tracking tool on a whim and found that I had worked 50 hours already.
What happened? My work hours usually swing between 15 and 35 hours tops. The entire point of this journey is to improve my work/life balance. Well… in the newsletter from a couple weeks back, I set myself a deadline. I told myself to finish a full Clysmoids game loop by the end of March. Because of that, I became so absorbed in programming that I didn’t notice the hours fly by. Did I just make myself do crunch?
What Am I Doing?
Well, not exactly. The problem was, that aside from making full-time hours on Clysmoids, I was also working on my tabletop roleplaying game as a hobby. After a hard day of coding, I wanted to relax in the evenings by dreaming up some concepts for the TTRPG system I’m working on. At some point though, I was not relaxing, I was working again.
So where is the line between hobby and work, if both of those are creative in nature? For me, it’s when I start to have goals for a project. A concrete sign is the first time I make a to-do list. In all your excitement for a shiny new project, it’s hard not to get ambitious. But with ambition comes expectation and with expectation comes stress.
Instead of taking the small hours of the night to unwind, I tricked myself into working 2 jobs at the same time. Naturally, it only took me a couple of days to get burned out by that. Luckily, I feel no strong obligation to hold myself to my deadlines, so I dropped everything and took the rest of the week off. I played video games in my pajamas intensively for a couple of days, and then I had a great weekend with friends, family, art markets, and therapy shopping. (Thanks mom!)
So where does that leave Clysmoids? Did I actually hit that milestone? Kind off. I got done with all the things I wanted to get done, aside from some bugs that popped up. It’s in a good enough state to leave it for a while as I start working on videos for April. Now the trick is not to fall into the same trap again…
Why Am I Doing? (this)
I believe a lot of creative people are struggling with this problem. They pick up a new medium like knitting or pottery and enjoy it thoroughly as a hobby, until they become good enough to start seeing it as a project. If you are someone like that, I don’t really have any advice for you except maybe, get a hobby that’s not creative. Also, allow yourself to be bad at something. You don’t have to become better at something as long as you enjoy doing it.
Ok, I’m going back to playing video games in my pyjamas now.