The Tortured Designer
Design and many other creative professions have a problem with a culture of overwork and suffering for success. No pain, no gain, right?
I don’t think so.
Suffering → success?
This week I was listening to a well-known and respected designer tell their story on a podcast. To my disappointment, they proudly spun a tale of grinding 16 hour days and not a single vacation for years to achieve their first taste of success. While they did acknowledge that it was just their experience and not the only way, given their platform I wish they had voiced this with a little more care and tact.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about showing up every day and applying consistent energy to doing something you want to be good at. And sometimes, you really do have to put in a little extra to get over the finish line. But at this point in my career, ten years in, I am fairly certain that maximum gain comes from doing the right thing at the right time and applying a focused and appropriate amount of effort.
Anything beyond that is just performance art or self-flagellation. If there’s pain involved, I don’t think you’re doing it right. Discomfort, maybe. But just as in exercise, pain means you’re probably doing something wrong. In most cases it will eventually lead to burnout and disillusionment.
Personally, I have been lucky to not have fallen prey to the extremes of the culture of overwork in design. I’ve had mentors that personally care about the wellbeing of their people, and in our studio we’ve built a comfortable yet challenging creative culture which I believe leads to an excellent standard of design. But I hear enough stories to know that this culture is still pervasive in the industry. Hopefully we can recognize it and actively work against it.
How does this happen?
Designers are exposed to this culture early in their careers. If you went to design school, I’m sure you remember the people that were always pulling all-nighters, working on their projects with feverish effort until the moment they’re due. Maybe it was you.
Sometimes they produce a stroke of creative genius, but more often than not, their work is haphazardly finished and mediocre. Still, they take it as a point of pride, a badge of honor for giving it everything they had. Because of their highly visible efforts, people start to notice. Maybe they even start to imitate.
This plays into the longstanding cultural trope of the Tortured Artist, who must suffer to fuel their creative genius. You don’t need to look far to see this trope everywhere, from real life examples like Kurt Cobain, to the constant fictional portrayals in movies like Black Swan or Whiplash.
An idea starts to take hold in the young designer’s mind: the more I suffer, the more visible my efforts, the better my design will be and the more I will be rewarded.
Then they are thrust into the professional world, where knowledge workers are already trending towards working longer and longer hours, and low-friction digital communication is feeding a culture of constant connectedness.
The young designer is eager to prove themselves, so they put in 110%. Maybe their managers and coworkers have been steeped in this culture for some time and they praise and encourage the designer’s efforts. Maybe they themselves have been through the gauntlet and feel that the young blood needs to “pay their dues”.
At some point, the young designer starts to become more concerned about the perceived effort than the design outcome. They work longer and longer hours at the expense of a healthy social life, exercise, or sleep.
What’s insidious is this kind of culture is self-reinforcing. Humans naturally mimic the behavior of those around them. If left unchecked, it becomes a game of effort brinksmanship. Nobody wants to be the first to leave the studio. Soon, everyone is still there at 9PM every day.
The young designer eventually becomes a seasoned designer. The culture described above has become the norm for them. They hire their own young designers. The cycle repeats.
The reality of creative work
The reality is that it doesn’t need to be that way.
Firstly I’ll re-iterate that consistent effort is important. A design professional should show up every day and do the work. But there is a point of diminishing returns. The Harvard Business Review found that long hours can lead to detrimental effects on decision making and interpersonal communication, more mistakes, and losing sight of the bigger picture.
In creative work it’s rarely a matter of “grinding it out”. Often a moment of insight and clear seeing will unlock a burst of productivity. A well-rested and clear mind is what usually leads to those moments. The consistent effort is what helps with the execution.
The HBR’s research also found that working less hours and having predictable time off actually increased productivity. This isn’t surprising. Parkinson’s law dictates that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
If you know you’re going to be at studio until 9PM no matter what, it kind of doesn’t matter what you get done. If you know you have dinner plans that night and need to be out the door by 6PM, you’ll identify and prioritize the truly important tasks.
More alarmingly, another HBR study found that managers couldn’t tell the difference in output between employees that actually worked 80 hours a week versus those who just pretended to do so, but they did penalize those who were transparent about working less.
So why should the perceived effort matter when the output is the same?
Why should those who get the same amount done with less effort be punished?
As designers, what we should care about is good design process and design outcomes. Rewarding unnecessary herculean efforts leads to a culture of overwork and suffer-signaling. Rewarding good process and outcomes produces a culture of effectiveness.
Finally, being happy and healthy just helps with everything. I recently came across a blog post by a Stanford mathematics PhD titled, “Pain is not the unit of Effort”. He makes a case for divorcing pain from effort and happiness being a general problem-solving strategy.
“Becoming happy is a fully general problem-solving strategy. And although one can in principle trade off happiness for short bursts of productivity, in practice this is never worth it.”
Xiaoyu He, Pain is not the unit of Effort
It’s unlikely we are at our most creative and productive when we are unhappy. A surefire way to improve your creative work is to become as happy as you can be. Having a good work-life balance, eating well, exercising, and investing in your personal relationships is a good place to start.
What can we do?
If you are a design educator or a designer that has achieved some level of success, and especially if you work with young designers, there’s a lot you can do to combat this toxic culture.
Recognize that the forces discussed above are at work and speak out against them. If you don’t believe overwork and suffering is the way to good design, say so. Make it explicit or those who look up to you will assume you are in the default camp. Lead by example and enforce a good work-life balance in your own life.
Don’t glorify overwork or over-attribute your own success to it. It can be easy to put ourselves on the hero’s journey and mythologize our own struggles. Ask yourself, how much of your best work did you really do when you were overworked, tired, and stressed? Talk more about the key insights and thinking that furthered your work and career, and less about the 3AM studio grinds.
Focus on design process and outcomes, and not on the perceived effort. Reward effectiveness and not brute force. Guide the designers you work with towards better ways of thinking and problem-solving, rather than pushing them to just grind it out. Make it clear that what matters is getting to the best solution, rather than a large performative effort.
If you see someone falling into the trap of overwork, see if you can give them an out. Sometimes, there’s a point where they just aren’t going to hit that deadline. Even if they do, it’s probably substandard work that has to be fixed up later. It’s OK to let people off the hook sometimes, and let them revisit the problem in a refreshed state.
16 hour days and years with no vacation shouldn’t be what designers aspire to. I hope we can work towards a design culture where creativity flows from happy, productive individuals and we can sever the ties between overwork, suffering and design excellence.
P.S. Wow, it’s been ten weeks of doing this every week! I’m actually surprised I’ve managed to stay consistent this far. Thank you to everyone who’s subscribed and is following this journey with me!
If you’re not a subscriber yet and you enjoyed reading this, drop your email in the form below to get my writing directly in your inbox every week!