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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

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