Creative Thinking

Coming off of an unusual weekend where I had Saturday off, worked Sunday, had Monday off, and am back to work again today, I haven't gotten back up to full speed quite yet. With three events over the next three weeks and another day of shooting interviews this Saturday, I feel like I'm already getting a bit drained.

I am what is considered a "creative professional" which encompasses design-oriented fields and basically all things visual. After completing a pretty detail intensive project last month we switched gears into duplicating 3,000 copies of it for our client. It was a nice change of pace, a way to unwind from focusing on all of the ins and outs of such a technical product. However, that too, began to bog me down with the repetition of loading the disk printer and stuffing the mailers and packing the mailers into boxes and on and on. We then had a job for 500 copies of another project - just the duplication - and we're expecting the arrival of the master for yet another 200 disks this week. We've been archiving a local history video series - for which we've been producing new editions - and I've been typing in the content for the wraps and inserting the thumbnails of the subjects.

That coupled with the event work we have coming up for most of this month hasn't been getting me all that excited, to be honest. I need to be creative or at least have the creative areas of my brain stimulated for me to feel motivated and productive. The past couple of weeks haven't really gone towards helping in that area - aside from the afternoon of shooting outside of NYC and redesigning the website for a youth group I work with.

I assume that other creative people find themselves in this situation as well; it's probably true in one form or another in any profession/interest area/what-have-you. Things are great when you are doing what you enjoy, what you were meant to do and when you do the things you have to do that aren't necessarily what you enjoy, you are left feeling drained rather than rejuvenated.

At least, that's where I'm at right now.