Gone surfing

One of the many good things about being freelance is the hours. Sometimes I'll have a week with very little on; sometimes I'll be working all hours. It's not constant, which is great, as those three little words 'nine' 'to' and 'five' fill me with a visceral dread only equalled by the prospect of being made to watch back-to-back soap operas at my parents' house. I have more time to do more of the things I like, and when I'm doing the things I like I tend to be thinking about stuff I'm working on and how I can make it better.

So in a sense, when people find out I work from home and ask me how I manage to switch off at the end of the day, the answer is that I never really do. This isn't a bad thing - if you love what you do, you don't view it as a 'job' but as something that challenges, pushes, inspires you - it's part of who you are. I went to see David Carson talk in London last year and he said that the perfect occupation is something you would choose to do even if you didn't need the money. I'm not saying that I want to spend even more of my time sat in front of my Mac, but the thing is, my best ideas are the ones that come to me when I'm not sat in front of my Mac.

The things I like to do to get ideas include gardening, painting, doodling, yoga and, most of all, surfing. The thing I don't like about doing the things I like is that when I get caught out doing them by clients, I feel a bit guilty. Which is stupid, because if I'm doing these things while I'm supposed to be sat in front of my Mac doing work for them, chances are I'm actually processing the problems and challenges raised by their brief, and coming up with creative ways around them.

I guess the guilt stems from when I worked in a design agency in Cambridge. We had this enormous fish tank, and when I was stuck for ideas I would sit in front of it and watch the clown loaches snuffle the gravel around or the plecostomus moodily swish the smaller fish out of his way. My boss (who was generally a Nice Person) would get a bit irritated by this. He seemed to think that I was skiving on his time. If we had a lot of work on and I went for a long walk and lay under an oak tree in my lunch hour instead dropping sandwich crumbs on my keyboard and cursing at Quark (for lo and behold children, back in those days of yore we did indeed use Quark), upon my return I'd get this Look, a Look that accused me of Not Taking The Work Seriously. In fact, I just needed to shift into a different gear - the gear that lets the ideas in.

It's a difficult process to put into words but it goes a little like this. You stop thinking with your head. Your focus shifts down, you breathe slowly and deeply: you think with your heart. Your brain sinks into the back of your head and your vision becomes peripheral: you do not focus on one thing but instead you see all. You forget yourself in the grander scheme of things: the goldfinch picks seeds from the bird-feeder hanging from the apple tree or the sunlight dances on the glassy sea as you paddle for a wave or the random melding of colours on the paint palette become something more... 

You can't think up ideas. They just come.