Don’t take the vacation. A foolproof recipe for designers to get the creative drive back

People get to where they are in life by following a process, whether they’re conscious of it or not ->?Mike Monteiro

Do you feel exhausted? Are you surrounded by unfriendly people who ignore the problems and insights you care about? But it was not why I accepted the offer initially, right? As honest as it would be, no one writes "lose the will to live" right next to gym compensation in the job offer.

What happened?

You are still creative. You have great ideas from time to time that you are willing to share. What has disappeared are the novelty and challenges of new territories, knowledge, and skills with risky paths to take and enticing benefits waiting just around the corner. You can't learn to make new products that no one has ever seen or used in a regular school. So what got you here is your insatiable thirst for new and exciting things.

The three problems

Happy days

Nothing beats the thrill of getting an offer. Someone validated that you are better than someone else! But there's more to motivational talks than that. This "someone" is willing to put a handsome sum of money where his mouth is. You can't wait to tell the astonishing news to your loved ones. The food on the table, that trip to Cancun you have delayed for the last couple of months.

But there's an end to every story. There's a day when you decide you can't keep doing your job any longer. If I know anything about motivation, people are exciting creatures with ups and downs ranging from the stock market to newly minted crypto coins. One week it's all chocolates and roses. The other one flows as?Another One Bites the Dust's soundtrack. Depending on how?creative and?impulsive you are,

So another faithful day happens, and you get an unexpected 1:1 from your manager.

Indeed, after a couple meetings that were fruitless in getting the inspiration flowing again, the man will tell you something about the product's interest," "the climate," "it's not personal," and, if you're lucky, mention?severance. The meeting starts, and as you catch your breath and observe how your anxious mind runs ahead of itself, the manager surprises you with the word promotion."

And everything stops. Promotion? What the hell is he talking about?

A Sugary Substitute

It's not the solution to the lack of interest and energy you felt for weeks, leading to bad performance. It's a substitute for the real thing at its best.

The creativity, the drive, the playfulness of your work? The promotion won’t get me anywhere close to these three. The friends call it burning out. The manager and colleagues root for you to take a vacation. Pick up a hobby. Spend more time with family and turn off your computer. But if there's a "drive switch" that turns it on and off again, you haven't found it. I’m here to give you an option of one that worked for me.

Nothing is for free

The bad news is that your product is no longer new to you. The excitement of novelty and the challenge are gone. The good news is that you can fix it. What's more, digging for gold in the product you are familiar with can be far more rewarding than repeating the loop of going on an interview and getting an offer for a brand new opportunity.

To get a better view, turn your empathy superpowers on and think about it from the manager’s perspective. You have a weak link in the product team — the designer. Nothing seems to be wrong with his worldview or the excessive self-criticism. So there’s nothing to change. May it be a promotion call? You need to plug the hole in the sinking ship and the best method for a short-term hole-plugging is the tried and true method Money. Vacation also works.

Now, turn the empathy off and think about yourself. As tempting as it might be, you'd like to think twice before accepting the promotion.

If you take it, it send a message to your manager now it’s all going to be back to normal. A message that he is paying for more of your expertise, focus, and inspiration for the product’s benefit in the long run. At the very least, he would want to use the money to get back the same designer he earlier hired and enjoyed to work with up till now.

The three solutions

I assume you believe in what your product does to have an impact, and you trust your colleagues are trying their best to help you on this journey

Journal Drainers and Pumps

Start writing down everything that makes your energy level jump. Since you wouldn't be reading this if you had plenty of those, start by listing the "drainers." How do you tell a drainer from a pump? Do you need a break after doing it? The toilet, coffee, and get-a-water break: count them all. If you do, mark it as a drainer. How do you tell if a pump is working? Did anyone on the team remind you that they have another meeting starting in the middle of the time you were about to drive home? Mark it as a drainer. Everything else counts as "meh."

Another hack is to add a value from the list that makes sense to you. A value must get you excited about it or angry about a seemingly neutral topic? That's a value. It's what you stand for and against. For me, it is the impact: how much value I bring to the product users and product team combined.

???Here's a table?to make it easier. Likert scale, 0 (none) -> 3 (max).

Talk to your manager

Assuming your manager is?not an asshole. Good managers are specially trained to help you overcome your personal and career problems. It's a joke, but it's still a person who is as interested in getting the product out there with the motivated designer as you are to keep being one.

Stimulate yourself

Do you remember what got your creative juices flowing? If you believe the?famous psychologist’s research, it was excitement, novelty, and challenge: the trio of stimulation value. My take is that a product designer can get the stimulation bump from one of them:

Novelty

• New responsibilities, e.g., requirement gathering Or whatever else gets you pissed off the most.
• New domains, e.g., if you work in finance, take a stab at insurance products.
• New skills, e.g., have you tried building a system to fix the design debt once and for all?

Challenge

• A rival (or nemesis) → a friendly challenge is always an easy way to spark interest. ex. I bet you can’t get at least one clickable prototype done each week. Every superhero needs a nemesis.
• Skunkworks?teams up with somebody with shared values to get something crazy done. ex., a user research funnel to get product managers and designers aligned.
• Get a mentor—not at work. Having a no-strings-attached conversation with someone who achieved what you dream to achieve someday is a?great way to cut the overthinking?and focus on what matters most.

Personal Interest

• Mixing hobbies with job needs (ex., introducing animation to the design process or public speaking to team meetings) can be a challenge and a personal interest fix at the same time.
• Introduce crazy ideas (green?hat) (ex.,?what if).

What else to consider

• taking soft commitments and setting clear expectations
• helping a teammate with something you weren't hired to do
• getting?decently good?at a skill

The Fairy called Inspiration

Let's do a thought experiment and?wear two black hats. The first one is Rich Black, and the other is Jet Black. Don't judge me. The second word in my title is designer. Ok, back to the experiment. It's been three months since the day when the promotion talk happened. And you should have managed to put yourself back on track with performance expectations. Long story short, you're fucked. You spent months searching for yourself, meditating, and drinking uncountable Pumpkin Spice Lattes at a local coffee shop.

Put the rich black hat on: you declined the promotion. Everyone thought you were the crazy one, and after a week, the manager started interviewing the replacement designers. In Rich Black Hat, you didn't get the offered promotion.

Don’t outsource your creativity, motivation, and career growth to anyone. That includes your manager, no matter how good a guy is he and how much experience driving product team he has.

In healthcare, there's a thing called an e-patient. An e-patient doesn’t wait for doctors to heal it and participates fully in the treatment. While there are always ways to be a dick, a good e-patient knows how to strike a balance between his eagerness to overcome the disease and trusting his doctor. A light-headed approach to motivation as being only money, vacation, or a creative fairy named Inspiration that only designers know how to summon can bite you in the ass in the moment least expected.

My story

A new senior UX designer has just quit. I just returned from my two-week-long vacation, and that was the first hot news I got. While people leaving our cozy e-commerce outsourcing dream UX team was nothing surprising, the weird thing is I didn't get to meet him. He worked for the company for two weeks before leaving. Because the office was too dark. After two months of hunting and an inter-company feud over who gets to put him on their fixed-price project for a hefty markup.

Two weeks.

In 2017, it sounded like a circus trick: the Amazing Two-Week Senior Designer came and went before you were back from vacation. Come right up! Right after my first?breakdown?burnout, I thought about his motivation differently.

The bottom line

• You will be a jerk if money or a vacation do not help.
• The company takes it personally when somebody wants to get more money for the work they already agreed to do in the first place for the original amount.
• Either the company gets value or the employee gets experience. The equilibrium of total happiness is short-lived.
• How do you know on which side of the spectrum you are right now? Easy. What sounds more familiar: When will you deliver X?" or "Great work! Now here's the next challenge."
• More "great works" means you are shipping value while most likely being underpaid.
• More "when you deliver" shows impatience about when the expected value will arrive.

Creative Job is a Relationship

It's real. It's out of your control. It will pass.

Getting into one is fun. First dates and the couple of months after are a fun fair. But at some point, reality kicks in. When it looks like a breaking point, you need to decide if it is serious and if it is a relationship you really want to last. The value that unites both relationships and jobs is trust. If you have built it on trust, the drive will either fade away or rekindle.

?? Did you have a different experience? Let me know in DM or comments

Deep dive

• manage energy, not time?← article
• Why has nobody told me this before??← book
• Five Reasons to Get Promoted and Then Quit?← article
• 19 Core values, refined?← scientific article

Photo by?Elia Mazzaro?on?Unsplash

Kudos to Alex T. for mentorship