How an artist’s experience helps in office routine.
Hi, I am Jen, and I run the SlowProductivity community. I write about slowing down without losing results.
I often struggled with perfectionism at work and loved getting buried in the little details, which made me burn out quickly. Until I noticed that I was making the same mistake in my tasks that I used to make in drawing.
I used to work as a graphic artist and loved small details. I would spend hours carefully drawing everything, making sure every little part was precise and polished. But then I would step away from the drawing for a minute to get a cup of water. When I came back and looked at it with fresh eyes, I could suddenly see that the drawing was literally falling apart. All those carefully drawn details were there, but somehow the whole picture just did not work.
I looked at the graphics of artists I knew. Everything was drawn seemingly very quickly and even somewhat awkwardly, not neatly, but the overall picture looked cohesive and pleasant to the eye. Whereas mine, even though everything was meticulously drawn, did not look as good as theirs.
The secret to why their work looked good was that they did not try to draw every single thing in detail, but focused only on what was important. They simply caught the eye with the main detail, and left everything else as a light background.
I decided to try doing the same. I stopped making a bunch of small accents, and instead started highlighting only the most important thing, making it larger and brighter. I allowed myself to leave “air” in the picture, meaning untouched space, and to convey the essence of the object through broad, light strokes rather than through an accumulation of textures. And everything started to work out. The drawings looked whole.
In the routine of office work, everything happened exactly the same way. Getting buried in small tasks, I once again missed the main thing, just like in those overloaded drawings. Instead of looking at the project as a whole, I got buried in the details.
For example, I could spend a long time rewriting one single sentence in an email, trying to achieve the perfect tone. But in the end, it was still read diagonally in three seconds. The email was sent with a delay simply because I got buried in polishing the text that was already doing its job.
In the end, I started doing things differently. I catch myself getting stuck and set reasonable limits for myself.
I started learning to catch myself more often when I feel: “I have been sitting on this for quite a while.” And ask myself: “Is what I have been doing for the last hour moving the project forward, or have I buried myself in the textures again?”
In exactly the same way, when drawing, I would step away from the canvas to check whether everything was okay with the overall picture.
I also did not start timing every small task. But for bigger tasks, I introduced a rule: in 30 minutes, do only the essence and move on. This helped me not give myself the opportunity to bury myself in micro-details.
And I also stopped filling my day with tasks to the brim, like those very piles of small strokes in a drawing. I intentionally leave 20 to 30 percent of my time empty; this is that very “air” that helps me avoid burnout.
So that I would not forget these rules, I wrote them down as a short reminder note in my app.
If you would rather keep such notes on your computer than in a notebook, there is an app for exactly that
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