I've been working in offices since the mid-1980s, and I've been involved in artistic endeavours probably just as long. One thing I've learned in that time: you cannot give your main work gig your best creative work.
I'm going to make an artist-oriented business case for reserving your best, most creative work entirely for yourself, especially if you also need to keep a steady job in order to pay for what really keeps you alive. You can benefit from all the bullshit that I've gone through in the past 35 years, basically trying to live a double life so that my paycheque, sanity and artistic trajectory don't get too screwed up, so you don't have to go through this yourself.
When project managers talk about what projects need to thrive, they usually point to three main areas of the project management triangle: money, effort, and time. Being an artistic person, you also require all three in order to survive. In this blog post, I'll set out three solid arguments (aligned with the corners of the project management triangle) about why it's better to keep your best work for yourself, and not giving it to your place of employment.
1. MONEY: You're not getting paid for giving them your best work.
Sure, if you get roped into performing at your organization's annual holiday festival or say, Specific Employee Type Appreciation Week, it can't hurt to learn a few standards on your instrument that you can quickly bang out; or to memorize and perform a pithy poem that's sort of related to the event at hand. Under no circumstances should you knock yourself out for anything more extensive, more time-consuming or more involved.
- First: Unless you work in a creative field or a creatively-oriented company, like a theatre, it is probably not in your job description and any time you take away to work on it during office hours will be held against you in the future.
- Secondly, you may be contravening the bylaws set out by your union, either at your "real" job or your creative job.
- And third, it sets out expectations that you will continue to contribute, unpaid, to anything tangentially related to this, like composing the "hold" music for a telephone system, writing background music for videos or online courses, or being expected to write the script for a promotional video. If this happens, you can point out that this is not the work that you were hired to do and, if you choose, offer to create a separate proposal for performing this work.
Don't feel flattered or obliged to perform the work. Save it for the people who will really like it and pay for it.
2. EFFORT: They may not need your best work, and may not really like it.
It's natural to want to do your best and to try to be creative and look for new solutions when you're in a job. This is what we've been told about work for the past 50 years. However, the problem with creativity in the workplace is that it's very much an emotional experience, and unless you and the person asking for the work are on the same page, odds are that the two of you will not have the same emotional experience about the work that you produce. You will be thrilled with the work that you've done, and the opportunity to bring something new and fresh into the workplace. If you're lucky, your boss might be, too.
More often than not, however, your boss is approaching it with a completely different vision, with different expectations, and unless you've been lucky enough to have a very specific set of guidelines by which you were supposed to create said thing, your boss will inadvertently be disappointed (angry, even!) at what you produced. Result: you're hurt, your boss is immensely irritated with you; and nothing good comes from you having made an effort above and beyond the duties of your original job description. You just end up with a target on your back, because as much as organizations say that they want to be creative, foster innovation, and get their employees to think outside the box, many of them are woefully inert when it actually happens. (This episode of NPR's Hidden Brain provides some interesting insights on why that is.)
I'm not saying you shouldn't be creative in your job; I'm saying that the risks involved in creating an amazing, hittin'-it-outta-the-park creative product are vastly greater than the rewards you're likely to get. Save it for the person who's really going to benefit from investing creative energies in a project: you.
** Another thing to remember: You can't sack you for having great ideas. You're safe in the knowledge that if you create, taking risks or getting edgy or taking a stance against something you heartily disagree with, no one else can take your creativity away from you. Managers and workplaces might say that it's not a sackable offence to be different from everyone else you work with, but anyone who's been sacked (or worse, not even hired) because they didn't fit into the corporate culture or miscalculated an approach knows full well that that's not the case.
3. TIME: Is doing creative stuff at work really the best investment of your time to get yourself ahead artistically?
Alison Green, at the Ask a Manager Blog, wrote something interesting last year:
We’ve convinced people there’s status to not getting paid more when they work more. We’d do well as a society to move away from that.
In all fairness, not all jobs are emotional vampires. There are jobs where quirkiness is embraced without being turned into a commodity; jobs where being just allows you to be, rather than be something that suits the employer. Hell, there are even jobs where people have been able to connect over creativity and take it to the next level: I've heard, anecdotally, that the members of Doctor and the Medics met while working at a branch of Barclay's Bank, in the UK**. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. And in many professions, it's an unspoken rule that the further up the career ladder you go, the more of your time your salary is expected to cover time outside of the number of hours you're expected to work per week.
I know this sounds like I'm saying Don't get promoted. Rather, I'm saying that if you choose to balance work and a creative pursuit, it's more beneficial to you to actively pursue a career where you will be able (encouraged, even!) to set healthy boundaries between work and non-work time. Remember Joni Mitchell's song, "Free Man in Paris", the one where the main character laments having traded a carefree Gallic lifestyle for being permanently attached to phones? There's nothing wrong if that's what you actively want and actively want to go for.
As the saying goes: Decide, don't slide. Don't let your place of work actively chip away at your free time, your time to make and create, unless you decide that that's really what you want. In my highly unscientific estimation, every hour of overtime results in two hours of non-creativity, and that increases by a factor of two after ten hours of overtime. If you want or need the overtime - great! If you want to keep that time for yourself, feel free to say no.
All of us only get 4,000 weeks on this earth, on average. Remember that the workplace is under zero obligation to love you back. And will always find a way to get rid of you once it doesn't need you any more.
Choose wisely.
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* - Obviously, that's not something I wanted to put in the headline, because I know that the Chief HR Honcho of my organization scours the Internet for my social media posts. And Robert, if you're reading this: Salut!
** - If someone can actively confirm (or shoot down) this anecdote, I'd be grateful.