The Path Runs Through Here
Why time spent on creative tasks is impossible to waste
“God. DAMMIT”, I growl as I monster-stomp out of the studio for a 2nd straight morning with nothing to show for my efforts.
Like many people reading this, my time feels stretched to new limits these days. The pressures of deadlines, the confusion of what it would mean to be a “good” parent, the vague injunction to stay active, the Sisyphean upkeep of domestic life.
As such, “time budgeting” and task triage are likely two of my most important daily activities. Under such conditions, the act of creating something often feels like an indulgence one cannot afford.
After all, how do you budget time for creativity? I know how long it will take me to go grocery shopping but how long will it take me to write Verse 2?
It could take 5 minutes on the way to said grocery store. Or it could require 2 hours and a waste bin full of crumpled note paper.
This particular morning, I’d made a 2nd attempt at filming a 60 second video for my website. That’s right: 60 seconds. Not exactly opus material, either.
Saturday, the day before, I had assumed I could film the thing in 90 minutes – leaving this morning for editing.
I had done all the prep work: cleaned the space, put up some additional acoustic treatment, played with the lighting, gotten a haircut as a token nod to professionalism, charged the battery of my wife’s fancy camera, set up a microphone and a camera stand.
Yesterday it turned out all the footage was worthless. The camera, fancy though it was, didn’t like the lighting. Things looked fine in the view finder but on the big computer screen I quickly realized it wouldn’t do.
Today I used my phone but again found the results unusable. The camera angle wasn’t right. The microphone had to be kept out of frame and didn’t behave the way I wanted. The audio didn’t sound good – an unforgivable sin on the website of an audio engineer.
180 minutes of sunk cost. 3 of god’s good hours. Gone. Nothing to show. Tomorrow is Monday.
The diesel-powered treadmill rolls on.
It’s easy to get upset.
But here’s the thing. The thing I realize time and time again only to forget the next time. That 180 minutes of churn is part of the process. Sometimes (even oftentimes) you can’t get “there” without going precisely through “here”.
Monday morning I carve out another 60 minutes at the expense of something else. I set up my phone, do some quick test takes for audio and video, and start rolling within 10 minutes. This is day 3. I know EXACTLY what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. I finish in 25 minutes. I’ve also learned what works in this space for footage shot from similar angles in the future.
There was no way for me to get this outcome without the churn of the past 2 days.
In our productivity-driven world, it’s easy to see time as a precious resource that mustn’t be squandered. This point was made wonderfully by Edward Hall – discovered by me in the Oliver Burkeman book Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals:
“Edward Hall was making the same point with his image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time.”
This is a persuasive illusion that I often embody but believing it in a creative context is likely to keep you spending time doing only things which can be precisely predicted – like watching 45 minute episodes of The Diplomat.
Milk must be churned into cream. And so too churn is the process through which creativity is refined and ideas start to take solid form.
It is not wasted time – just “the time it takes”.
So if you’ve spent 2 hours writing Verse 2 and feel you’ve gotten nothing – just know that the path to completing that song runs precisely through here. That, when the time is right and those perfect lyrics seem to pop magically into your head, it wasn’t magic it all. It was the fruits of your struggle.