BURRNOUT

I recently came in contact with the works of Cal Newport - and from what I understand he's written quite a lot, so my knowledge of his body of work is still very limited. But I've heard him talk a lot about mental overhead and overwhelm, which I definately recongnize in myself. In one of his videos he said something along the lines of:

"its the overhead of coordinating and collaborating work that is causing overload and the resulting symptoms of burnout"

That really struck a chord with me. If you read my previous post I wrote, it touches a lot on the fact that I've been struggling with getting all my creative works out there. It's basically been like this:

• I've had a repository of ideas and projects which my mind effectively turned into an evergrowing todo-list
• I haven't really asked myself: do I even WANT to do all these projects?

And the question I'm left asking is: what can be done to safely say: "no, let's not do this" or "yes, lets go for it!"

Its not actually doing the things that cause the burnout - its the planning, the coordinating, and maybe most of all, letting the list of "unfinished" projects continue to grow.

MORE DO, LESS THINK

I noticed an intersting pattern now when I started working on the imamura doc with the intention of completing it.

• I originally planned it was just going to be documenatation, sort of like a collection of vlogs
• Then it became a "proper documentary" - basically: "Add cinematograpy!"
• then it instead became a "proper documentary about me and Takahatas friendship"
• and now, that I'm editing it, i'm basically back at square 1 again - it should just be a "document of that time"

And while I'm there, I also want to add a note on why; I dont want that experience to be burdened by the sadness of his passing - his passing truly is a tragedy, but it happened way later. It's so easy to make that into a kind of cheap storypoint, to give it a shadow of a looming tragedy, but that was unimaginable then. It would really just feel almost like an explotation of his passing, and not a celebration of his life and work.

Allowing yourself to get lost on your way

I think another sadness about letting creative work like this become fuel for burnout by becoming an TODO-list (which, of course, isn't intentional, but still) is that you so easily forget the actual joy of creating, and the unintended consequences that can come of just getting lost in that process.

For example, getting back to the Imamura documentary - I was struck by the idea that it would be cool to do PS1-style intro - this would of course in practice mean quite a lot of added work, specifically 3d modeling and animation, which I'm still very much a n00b at. But I let myself do that, and now, it's turning out pretty cool! And most of all, it's FUN!

Not to mention, I feel how much this opens up new avenues for future music videos and stuff like that, it's literally a whole new world of expression that I'm completely stoked about getting into. Like, ÖDESMUST music videos in a retro dungeon crawler kind of look? It has the potential to be SICK! I'm not quite done with the intro for the documentary just yet though...