The strategic importance of naps

The first tricky thing about having a day job is time management. You lose more than the eight hours a day you may spend at work, you also lose the time it takes to get ready and then travel there and then travel back again. Bathing is important. As is putting on trousers, apparently. The time frustration really kicks in around 10am for me. I’m awake and energized (coffee) and ready to write! And I’m at work… All the awesome ideas I have are clamoring for attention in my head and it feels almost sacrilege that I’m ignoring them. And they all seem all the more awesome for being denied.

Then, when finally home at the end of the day, my brain is fried and words are hard and blah.

The second tricky thing is keeping your Voice. This is a more subtle thing that creeps up on you, especially if your day job involves being around lots of other people. The language, the conversations, slip into your mind. Any artistic pretensions you may have drown in the grey tedium of normality until you catch yourself being vaguely amused when someone says “working hard or hardly working, right?” Your own hopes and dreams become more and more ephemeral; worse, seemingly irrelevant. In a mild state of panic you’ll ask a colleague what they are working on, thinking they’ll tell you about their screenplay or sculpture class but instead they say “same shit different day,” and you’ll want to run naked from the room wearing nothing but a strategically placed post-it note that has “completely out to lunch” scrawled on it.

The first trick that works for me for both of the above is naps. Come home from work and have a nap. It doesn’t have to be a big nap, you don’t even have to fall asleep, but make sure you spend at least 20 minutes in a dark and quiet space with your eyes closed. Let it all quiet down. Let it all fade away. Settle. You could be in bed or under it, it doesn’t matter. Build a blanket fort and use it as a safe buffer between the day you just had and the extra mini day you are squeezing in once you get up again. Let your Voice come back. Trust me. The time you spend on the nap you will more than make up for in creative productivity.

The other trick is to lose the separation in your head between work and life. You are a creator. There are patterns and stories everywhere for you to find. My current job is to enter employees’ hours into a calendar spreadsheet. It is excruciatingly tedious work and over the last couple of weeks I’ve entered hundred of pages of this data. But there are patterns to the numbers. It’s story-telling at its most basic. This person worked normal hours for a year or so then suddenly they worked lots of extra hours for months, then took five weeks of holiday. This other person hardly took any sick leave and never worked public holidays but then took two weeks bereavement leave. After that they worked public holidays. After that they started taking more sick days. There are stories and patterns to be found everywhere. Our calling as creatives is to find these stories and grow our craft of telling them. Normal is real. Our role is to make it sing.