Recently, The 99 Percent, a research arm and think tank of Behance, ran a terrific blog post about balancing work and life as a creative professional.
The blog post displays an excerpt from Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, where he describes work as what we do by the hour – for money, if possible. Hyde then differentiates creative labor as something that is harder to quantify – something that has its own schedule and may take longer, such as writing a poem, or creating a painting.
Creative professionals recognize that there is some overlap here, and that the two can often be easily confused. Creatives might try to rush a creative process in the name of work, or work diligently and tirelessly through a long process that required breaks from mental stress and ware for the sake of creativity.
Above all, the two can also easily get mixed up with personal life. It’s easy to get absorbed by a creative task that one wants to complete, while losing track of the direction of one’s life.
Nigel Marsh had an insightful TED talk on this topic last year, which remains relevant to this day. Watch this talk, and then let us know how you plan to balance work, creative labor and life.
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