“Fill your own cup with what gives you energy”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“As a marketer drawn to design and creativity, I often find myself pulled between making something meaningful and delivering instant, measurable results. In a results-driven industry that rewards speed and performance, how do you create space for creativity without it feeling indulgent or impractical?

How do I make my work meaningful, beyond just ‘getting things done’?”

Kat Wong, founder of career change platform Oh Yeah:

This is the question that every single creative human grapples with, especially if they’re staring down the barrel of their weekly work schedule on a Monday morning, inbox on fire by 10:16 am. But ironically, the art of getting the right balance between ‘results-driven’ work (delivering on the goals needed) and creating space to cultivate something more meaningful (without the guilt) is all about mastering your schedule.

So here’s your first reflection point to get you there:

What’s your optimum time of day and week where you feel most energised or in the flow for deep work? The other way of looking at it is this: when do you not like being interrupted during the day?

For me, it’s early mornings, before 10.30 am and Fridays where I prefer to have no meetings (read: boring/non-important ones).

It may take a bit of experimenting to figure it out, especially if you’re juggling a number of responsibilities across multiple teams, work and life.

This is how I approached it during a time looking after an international creative team, dealing with the demands of a young kid on top of several different time zones. But I gradually sussed out what worked for me with little experiments, and managed to protect two working mornings per week, blocking out my calendar to ensure no meetings before 10:30 am. This allowed me to work on projects which creatively sparked or energised me. A key distraction is the inbox. So, whatever you do, do not tackle emails first thing – except for a quick scan to see if anything important happened overnight. And remember, if its that important, someone will tell you.

As a team, we also created a pact together: never schedule a Friday meeting. This gave everyone permission to politely reschedule a non-time-sensitive meeting to another day. It was an effective move that gave everyone sanity and respect, not just for our personal energy, but for our own creativity. My boss didn’t even realise we did this until a year later, proving that it did not impact the quality of our work or productivity. In fact, it made us all better and less cranky for it.

So identify two to three chunks across the week where you can protect and nourish yourself with work that is meaningful to you. When you fill your own cup with what gives you energy, it always puts you in a better frame of mind, ready to deal with any business-as-usual projects and demands you need to respond to.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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