This week I’ve been in India working at our production house on the design and development of Fall/Winter ’24. When I’m here and away from the day-to-day business operations of the studio, I’m able to sink into creative work and tap into my designer brain.
There are two types of work that I do—creative work and operational work—and they are meaningfully different enough that I’ve found it helpful to make clear distinctions between the two:
Creative work requires long blocks of unstructured time to research, experiment and make attempts at creating something that doesn't yet exist—this usually does not immediately result in the desired outcome. It can take days, weeks, months or years to bring your creative work to life. For example, when I sit down to create a print, I may work for 6 hours straight and still not have a print to show for it because my designs just didn’t hit that day. I certainly put in the work, but I didn’t get out the desired outcome.
Operational work on the other hand, requires tight blocks of structured time to check off things on the to do list. Generally, time in equals results out. I can walk into the studio on a Wednesday, know that I need to send out a marketing email, hold a meeting, update the website and analyze financials—and get all of my action items done by end of day. These are tasks that are within my control and ones that I can feel good checking off my to do list.
You can start to see the distinction—creative work is more open ended, experimental, and difficult to control, while operational work is more straight forward, proven, and easily controlled. In an ideal world, you’re either a creative or an operator, but as many of us in the mix are familiar with—you have to be multiple things. Oftentimes you have to be both creative and operator. You have to code switch between both brains throughout the day or week. Today I want to dive deeper into creative work.
Right now, I’m in a 10 day block of creative work. I’m thinking deeply about product, brand, merchandising. It’s a complete rabbit hole. I can think and research and jot down notes and sketches for 4 hours and have nothing concrete to show for it. In fact, I feel even more lost and unraveled than when I began! That doesn’t mean I didn’t get anywhere, this work simply requires more time to come to fruition. You have to untangle and deconstruct before you can build. But if I was measuring myself based on my operational work standards, I’d feel guilty—I’d feel like I wasted my time and got nowhere because I couldn’t check anything off my to list at the end of the day. Sound familiar?
Another key element in creative work is uninterrupted, unstructured time. You need time and space to follow different threads of thought and ideas and find flow—somewhere away from the daily pings and comings and goings of life. Being in India helps me with this. I’m not taking meetings, I’m not working around the daily operational flow of the studio, I’m not even in the same time zone as my friends so no one’s texting me while I’m working. Whatever your method is, it’s important to create that uninterrupted time block so that your creative flow doesn’t get stopped by distractions. Communicate with others when you’re having your creative days so they know not to ping you, or so that they know why you’ll be slow to respond. On my creative days, I don’t take any meetings. I try not to look at my inbox, or dashboard, or anything that might fire up my operational brain.
Finally, creative work often does not feel the most urgent. It's the thing that we can push to the bottom of our to-do list without seeing immediate repercussions today. The problem is that, over time, this de-prioritization compounds and leads to deeper problems that become even harder to solve. We have to find a way to connect with the deeper, creative work today, even if it's only one hour a week to start.
If you can't tell, I'm guilty of de-prioritizing creative work. It's so easy for me to get swept up in the day-to-day operations of Mixed, which I enjoy and honestly sometimes find easier and more gratifying. Up until now, creative work has consistently been something I’ve left on the back-burner. It's the thing I get to do once my to-do list is done (the catch is, it never ends). I haven’t treated creative work as part of my regular weekly workflow. I hesitate to prioritize it because it feels like I’m playing around. But the reality is that the core of my job is to create pieces that people love. To do that, I need to research what people are wearing on the streets of NYC, pop into shops to research their merchandising techniques, design prints, sketch silhouettes. All this stuff sounds like fun, but it requires serious, disciplined work. It’s core to building Mixed.
However, reality check—I, like most people, am not at a place where I can solely focus on creative work. I still have to run the business and use my operational brain (which fortunately, I also love doing). As a creative, you have to be willing to do the operational work when you get started and for many years after that. It’s the sound operation that allows for more creative space. In fact, up until now, I had very little space for creative flow. Even now, my creative days may be 1-2 days a week, just to provide some practical perspective.
As I lean into more creative work this season, I’ll be rewiring my method of working and measurement. I'm learning to properly value my creative work. I’m going to set aside long, unstructured, uninterrupted time blocks and learn how to comfortably navigate the ambiguous space of creativity. In contrast to the immediately gratifying feeling of checking things off my to do list, I’ll have to learn to be patient to see results.
Balancing creative and operational work is really challenging! And an ever-continuous practice.
~Nasrin
