Work Life Balance – The Perfect Creative Balance Ratio
Let’s face it: when you join the Advertising and Design profession, you want to do Beer Commercials and car Ads and work on big-time accounts, creating memorable lines that outlive campaigns and creating Award-winning work.
For most of us, the reality is that the Sizzle is a much smaller part of the business than the Steak.
The perfect balance of creative and production work in the design business is 90% production and 10% creative.
The Steak consists mainly of hard-working little communication pieces that supplement and enhance the strategies and plans of the overall creative direction of advertising campaigns. There’s money in statement stuffers, direct mail, brochures, and all kinds of collateral that require staples. Even though we all want to be Mad Men, advertising Design is primarily down-and-dirty production work that pays the bills.
But it can’t be 100% production work all the time, or in an industry known for burnout, you will burn out faster than you inevitably will. Sorry, everyone goes through a burned-out era.
Over the years, I’ve found immense satisfaction and solace in producing the Advertising and Design Campaigns I’ve commanded, steered, and participated in. There’s a unique joy in seeing your ideas come to life – does anybody still do press checks?
I’ve also experienced burnout from doing too much production work with little chance to use my natural creative abilities – we are all creative. These experiences, and some great bosses along the way who realized this creative person’s dilemma, have taught me the importance of balancing your work to keep the profit train moving (production services) while also allowing your creative spirit to flourish (the sizzle).
I like to keep my balance of creativity and production work at around 90/10. It’s an excellent ratio that guides you to stop the creative process, which can go on forever at times, and get down to making the creative ideas happen. This balanced approach ensures that both the creative and production aspects of your work are given their due importance.
There’s a book and philosophy around 99% production and 1% creative that I have tucked away on my bookshelf that helped me frame my balance between being innovative and, frankly, getting s@!t done (GSD).
The GSD part of the equation is most important to me. What’s your balance of creative work to GSD? Cheers!
