All Work and No Play Leads To Burn-out
Do you have a guilty pleasure ? Well if you do, then maybe the time to indulge it is when it feels like your eyes are square and your bladder’s touching the table. That’s definitely the point when I get out my studio for a break.
I spend a lot, and I mean a lot of time in a small, but very nice studio in Hampshire UK. It’s comfortable, well equipped and its where I make all kinds of VoiceOver magic happen for clients around the World. I’m happy in there, creating characters and audioguides and very often I lose all sense of time.
After a while in there though, the feeling of creative magic starts to be replaced with slightly jaded numbness, as you drift out of productive mode and start to drift. It’s a demanding place to be, a hermit existence at times and not good to linger when the work is done. Ok it’s not working down a coal mine, but narrating 2 – 1/2 hours of audiobook content daily, or any kind of Voiceover work is mentally taxing. It’s probably the hundreds of micro-decisions and constant hat changing.
A Rest Makes you More Productive
The solution isn’t rocket science, just take a rest every now and then, which doesn’t mean checking your emails and death scrolling Youtube.
Exercise isn’t just good for getting the blood flowing and the oxygen into your brain, it gives your creative mind the space to breathe while you’re distracted. I may start the day with a warm and engaging tone, but I need to re-charge to keep it that way. It’s fair to say that most people don’t have their greatest insights whilst sat in front of a screen; Archimedes had his greatest idea in the bath. Plenty of big ideas have been originally penned on a bar napkin – Why is that ? Its because they’re in a bar, relaxed and free of pressure. Yes I make voices for video, but I can’t live in front of a screen all day.
Having No Time Is A Myth
In your endless drive for originality, creativity and applying all the daily advice you’ve filled your head up with from the Sages on Social Media, you take the short term view that working round the clock is what needed. You believe the only way to deliver that quick turn-around is to work all hours, so you get an edge on the competition. All you’re really doing though is starting the clock towards ‘burn-out‘. The trajectory doesn’t seem steep at first, but when the reduced productivity compounds itself, your famed friendly British RP starts to be less convincing as the days and weeks go by. So sometimes the most productive thing you can do is……nothing.
The Cheeky 15 Minute Break
Exercise is good for the longer breaks, but what about the short ones, the cheeky, mindless 15 minutes here and there ? You need these too so you can reset and re-charge as the day progresses. However, this really must be away from the work-space. Thats where your guilty pleasure comes in handy.
My Guilty Pleasure
I spent my childhood growing up in the UK in the 1970s, when commercials were cheesy and there were 3 TV channels. My guilty pleasure is low quality ‘Old TV Shows‘ from the 1970s and 80s. There’s something about 70s and 80s TV dramas that suck me in just enough to dis-engage and tune out. Maybe it’s the high production quality ?
My Favourite Old TV Shows
1. Tales of the Unexpected (clever, wonderfully naive and brilliantly creative).
2. Hammer House Of Horror (almost a parody of themselves).
3. The Sweeney (did people really behave like that back then) ?
Whats So Good About Bad TV ?
Is it just a happy nostalgic indulgence?
I find they’re so distant in every sense from the here and now that they’re the perfect distraction. They come from an age of explosive creativity though, constrained only by tech and with creators schooled in the 60s.
The cartoons of the 70s were wild, untamed and properly creative, probably dreamt up in Putney bedsits on rainy Sundays when everything closed at 2pm.
The Greatest Creative TV Period ?
They call it ‘The Long 60s’, that long hangover that ended with the arrival of ‘He-Man’ in 1981.
There’s something wonderfully naive about shows featuring local police officers solving murder cases, before heading home for tea.
The cars driving down half empty roads in London, the stations with single pane glass windows and the innocently blind social stereo-typing:
‘Oh this scene involves a surgeon at home, better play some classical music’
I’ll skirt around the casual acceptance of misogyny and other evils at this point, but this just adds even further distance (thankfully).
Is it a guilty pleasure, probably and I’ll admit that I’m usually alone when watching. Getting right out of the studio and away from the tech is essential for a break; and after 30 minutes of Kojak you might as well have been on the moon.
So what’s your guilty pleasure ?
Have A Break And Then Lets Talk
I’d love to have been doing Voiceover work in the 70s and 80s, hanging out with Tom Baker in Soho between episodes of Dr Who. However, we are where we are now and if you want to get in touch to discuss a project then please feel free to Reach out. I’ll help take some of the load from your shoulders with quality narration, always happy to help.
