Making Things in December

So I landed in a rut. Creatively speaking, at least. I realized I’ve been generally feeling pretty uninspired lately and have also been getting worked up over some pretty inconsequential things. Obviously this isn’t a good place to be.

I got sucked into an enterprise-client vortex that’s consumed a lot of my time and energy over the better part of this year. I’m managing a team, and that’s left very little time for actually doing any real hands-on work. Don’t get me wrong: I love my work, I love my team, and there are plenty of challenging and rewarding problems I’m helping solve. But it’s become a bit all consuming.

I think another thing is that a lot of the work I’ve been doing is a step away from actually making stuff. I’ve been establishing processes, shaping teams, and corralling design and technical decisions. The people part of design systems is so incredibly important, but I’m realized focusing on that stuff has pulled me away from actually making websites.

But that’s still client work. I used to just make stuff. I don’t make stuff anymore. And that makes me sad. Managing time is tough, and between client work and toddler wrangling there’s little room left for other creative endeavors. I’ve always tended to have side projects kicking around, but that’s languished as of late. Now, I just want to sleep.

So that’s my problem that I need to work on. Part of my solution is to commit to making something — anything — every day this December and share it on my site. I’m keeping the definition of “making something” pretty loose, but it can’t be specific to client work. Here are some of things I’d like to do:

Write some blog posts
Write some songs
Record some music
Make some videos
Make progress on some side-project websites
Draw
Paint
Wood working
Home improvement projects
Anything else that feels worthwhile

Whatever I end up doing, I’ll capture it here on my site. I’m hoping this exercise helps kickstart my inspiration and gets my creative juices flowing again.