Sustaining a creative workflow can be challenging, especially under high-pressure and demanding deadlines. Over time, I have come to understand the importance of finding a balance between my work life and home life. Alongside tips and tricks that personally help keep me creatively productive.
When I began my role as a runner at Sound Disposition, this strengthened my ability to multitask while obstaing company standards and good clientele. Now I am an assistant sound designer I can manage multiple projects at once. While curating high-quality results. However, over time, it became clear to me that overstimulating yourself with a big workload could dull your creative flair. I recently experienced this on a project sound designing for a gallery piece with the National Portrait Gallery and Frameless collaboration. This project required us to produce 15 individual short immersive soundscapes based on different celebrities over time. With a tight deadline and an ongoing process of sending between directors, mixers and on-site producers, there was no time to go over the given deadline for each piece. After a few weeks of pumping out sound design work, I felt that I had run out of creative ideas and inspiration; and with no time to stop and search for this it ultimately effected my work. My work began to sound stale and mundane. Learning to cope with this is something I have yet to master, but I strive to do. Upon reflection, I hope to be able to get to a place in my career where I have built up a creative team. I believe this comes with time and commitment, something that is increased over time. I will continue working on projects to hopefully achieve the level of constant creative workflow that I hope for.
Something that I find valuable for developing my creativity is variation. Moving forward into the future, I hope to continue working on a vast range of genres and different styles of work. This broadens my creative skills and teaches me new techniques which can be carried throughout my career in our company. Pidgeon wholeheartedly believing yourself as a creative can lead to a limited career, leaving your creativity unchallenged. A plateau in creative development can lead to a lack of stimulation, ultimately no longer making art feel unenjoyable. However, despite challenging yourself with various tasks, it is crucial to keep a structured workflow to prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed. In the future, I aspire to have an organised, structured workflow which consists of various work, genres and styles.
To maintain and upkeep a creative career, it is crucial to network beyond your normal 9-5. Keeping professionalism and connections beyond your normal day job is a key fundamental part of maintaining a place within the creative field. However, despite this, maintaining a balanced work-life balance is significant in upkeeping artistic expression. As artists, we are made up by our external influences and stories. Having an outside life to our career helps form us as artists. Additionally, it keeps you mentally at peace as well as physically. Engagements with the world enrich artistic development and ensure a tough with a long, successful career.
Cresative roles often do not mirror other industries in their workflow balance. Individuals tend to work long hours and have individual creative stress rather than the stress reflecting on the company as a whole. Not taking work can leave you in the dark and mean that you are isolated from other future work opportunities. Having spoken to various individuals, many have told me to never say “no” to a job as this can leave you pushed aside when others may want to ask you in future. In an article by the University of Technology Sydney, they explain the challenges that this can be discriminatory for women…
And there is active discrimination, too. If you can’t do a job at a certain time for a particular reason, then the feeling is that people are overlooked or are actively kept out. Hopefully, that will change, but it is still very gendered. Caregiving roles still tend to fall to women, meaning that women also tend to be overlooked, overtaken or left out because of those requirements. Women simply leave or are unable to secure long-term leadership positions.
Many women in their early career feel that they are forced into an industry that is catered for men. I believe this to be true; having spoken to many women, no one has expressed any different opinion. Many have told me that the reason they do not have children is down to the chance that the industry could isolate them afterwards. This upset me and made me question my career path at first. It felt like having a career or becoming a mother were two choices that could not exist in the same universe. However, recently I discovered a “women in sound” support group that tries to challenge this barrier to inclusion. The group works closely with professional bodies to create awareness around the matter while ultimately celebrating individual females and minorities within the sound industry. It is groups like women in sound that I believe create a healthier and sustainable work lifestyle. I intend to go frequently to their meetings and keep close with any similar groups that uplift females like they do.
Overall, to upkeep a healthy work lifestyle, it takes structured creative diversity, alongside a healthy balance between your job and home life. Finally, following chaoitable groups who celebrate minorities and support you as an individual within a discriminatory industry is vital to maintaining a healthy and inclusive worklife.
Bibliography:
Sydney (2023). Why is work/life balance a struggle for creative industries? [online] Uts.edu.au. Available at: https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2023/09/why-worklife-balance-struggle-creative-industries.