April 10, 2025 · Episode 15
49 Min, 28 Sec

Summary

Is rigidly scheduled “deep work” the only path to creative productivity, or is there room for a more flexible flow? After sharing a few tales from the trenches of real life (including questionable op shop kettle repairs and kid-related gross-outs), Lyndon and Breallyn question the necessity of large, uninterrupted blocks of time for artistic pursuits. They explore the pressure and stress that comes when dedicated creative windows get unexpectedly shortened, contrasting the structured “deep work” concept with the often more fluid, inspiration-driven nature of making art.

The conversation delves into the importance of mental preparation and incubation, the frustration of losing momentum, and whether years of experience can enable meaningful creation even in shorter bursts.

Love this conversation? Get exclusive podcast episodes on our Patreon and support the show!

Transcript

Breallyn: I’m a little concerned. I have a concern about today’s episode, and that is that I went away on a girl’s weekend. And I’m afraid that my quota of words for the entire week has been used up. So I don’t know if I’m gonna make it through this episode and have anything to say. Also, my whole mouth and throat might just give out and not work. So if that happens…

Lyndon: What did you get up to on this girl’s weekend?

Breallyn: So much talking.

Lyndon: A bit of golf?

Breallyn: No.

Lyndon: Swimming?

Breallyn: Oh yeah. Actually, we did go swimming. Yeah. In the pool, but oh, okay. It was more like a bob around and continuation of the before-mentioned talking.

Lyndon: Oh, okay.

Breallyn: It was just talking. We just talked a whole lot. Okay. We hit four op shops and a bazaar.

Lyndon: It sounds like you… it sounds like you robbed them if you hit them. You did a hit on four op shops.

Breallyn: No, I paid 50 cents for a beanie at the op shops, which is cute.

Lyndon: Are the… are op shops better in the country rather than in the city? The city ones seem to be devoid of anything fascinating anymore.

Breallyn: Yeah, maybe. It’s the area that you go to or the specific op shop. Some of them are better at collating things, I think. Yeah. But the ones we went to were quite interesting and got a couple of little bits and pieces. Nothing too exciting, but yeah.

Kettle Repairs and Frugal Beginnings: Sharing Teabags?

Lyndon: I think one of the ones you went to is where I got a kettle for $8 that we’re still using.

Breallyn: Ah, yes. And it’s our fancy kettle.

Lyndon: It’s our fancy, slightly schizophrenic kettle. It’s got so many buttons on it, and sometimes you’ve gotta push them in different orders and three times to get the setting that you want. Yeah. And the lid did break. The lid did break, but I’m loving my replacement lid.

Breallyn: You’ve actually done a good job. The replacement lid is like off a keep cup type, hot drink cup. Yeah. And you just put it on and it even opens and closes with the buttons, so that’s pretty good.

Lyndon: Yeah. If I owned a lathe, a woodworking lathe, I definitely would’ve fashioned a nice wooden, maybe like…

Breallyn: …an oak lid to a stainless steel kettle. Yeah. Yeah. That has a mind of its own. And just make it pop, put a little bit of pizzazz on the top, would be nice. But yeah, you just never know. Polish steel, and you might… and wood is… you might push the button because you want a cup of tea, but it decides that it’s giving you a coffee or a herbal tea instead.

Lyndon: It doesn’t make the drink, it’s just the temperature.

Breallyn: Yeah, just the temperature.

Lyndon: And it also has a like a reheat button, which I think is a good idea and I think it probably does save energy. Every couple of minutes, it just tops up the heat again, if you haven’t already… if you’ve walked away from the kettle.

Breallyn: Yeah. If you haven’t taken it out of the holder.

Lyndon: Yeah. So that’s a…

Breallyn: Yeah, that is a nice little feature.

Lyndon: It’s made us feel like we’re living the high life. It doesn’t take much. Do you remember, I like this story because we tell it, we’ve told it recently to people. When we think back on when we were first married, and when we were first married, we had just got back from… it was three months after we traveled Australia for a year and we left with $300 and had to work our way around the country.

So that’s probably where we got in the habit of sharing a teabag. That was the worst. It just sounds like such a Povo thing to do. It was a Povo thing to do now.

Breallyn: And they weren’t even like good branded teabags…

Lyndon: Home brand, the home brand. And they’re probably worth like what, a cent each, if you’re lucky.

Breallyn: Yeah. And we shared one. It’s just sad. Did you get the first or the second dunk? I think we took turns just to keep things fair. I hate that about us right now.

Lyndon: You hate that memory or you think we still do it? We don’t do that.

Breallyn: No, we don’t do that. No.

Lyndon: We’ve come a long way. That was curious, wasn’t it?

Breallyn: It took us a while also to work out that if we bought a tube of toothpaste each, we’re still using the same amount of toothpaste. It’s just that we’ve invested in the extra amount upfront instead of waiting till the first one runs out.

Lyndon: Yeah, I did hear many years ago that apparently couples argue a lot over the toothpaste and like the simple solution was just get one each. I was like, how many people haven’t thought about that? But I guess too, when I was a kid, we all shared the toothpaste. We didn’t have one each.

Breallyn: Oh, okay. I can’t remember.

Lyndon: You had a big age gap between you and your brother.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. But I can’t imagine that you guys would’ve shared. I can’t remember. I can’t remember, shared one. I probably…

Breallyn: …not.

Lyndon: I’m certain I shared one with my two sisters. Wow. At the very least. Yeah. And even say en suites weren’t a thing, so yeah. The bathroom was shared by everyone.

Breallyn: I remember your younger sister telling me that they decided that they had an electric toothbrush, but all they needed was one of them. Who’s they? Her and the family.

Lyndon: And her family, yeah. Yeah.

Breallyn: So her husband and three daughters. They got one electric toothbrush and then they were just like, buy the heads of it and swap them for each person brushing their teeth. Now I don’t know how long that lasted.

Lyndon: But I’ve seen that. I don’t use one of those, but I’ve seen the heads of them. They’re quite short.

Breallyn: So that means there’s a good…

Lyndon: …portion of the shaft that everyone’s…

Breallyn: …pretty much, and if you’re a messy brusher, that foam is slopping down onto the handle. So yeah, I don’t think anyone was keen on it.

Toothpaste Tactics and Kid-Related Horrors

Lyndon: Like the other day when I was looking to see where our daughter was, and she often runs up into our en suite and puts on your makeup, which pretty much is just is it the eyeliner gets the pencils? Yeah.

Breallyn: She gets the eyeliner pencils. I’ve got a little stack of them and she likes to grab them. She likes the blue one predominantly.

Lyndon: ‘Cause, I love what she does with it. She pretty much, she starts to trace the bottom of her eye for about a centimeter, and then just brings it straight down past the nose, past her mouth, all the way down.

Breallyn: It’s like tears. Like tears. She’s tears. Tears like tears.

Lyndon: Anyway, so I came up one day and she was there diligently brushing her teeth with your electric toothbrush, man.

Breallyn: And do you reckon I can get her to brush her own teeth? No, I don’t. That’s what’s funny.

Lyndon: But also I told you about… I said, by the way, this happened today.

Breallyn: Oh yeah.

Lyndon: And then yeah, that night I think it was you were brushing your teeth.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I reminded you about it and you’d forgotten.

Breallyn: Yeah. I’d forgotten. But I didn’t care to remember. We’ve shared way too many intimate things that I remember. She coughed in your mouth once when she was kissing you.

Lyndon: Yeah. And when she had covid.

Breallyn: So yeah.

Lyndon: When I… this will be the last story of this kind today. I’m putting… I’m just gonna put a stop to it after this one.

Breallyn: It’s too sad. People won’t wanna listen to our sad details of our life.

Lyndon: No, this isn’t sad. It’s just gross. Awesome. But when I… it was running the coffee van. I’d have a water bottle in the coffee van, and I must have picked her up one day from the bus or something. And anyway, the next day I’m driving around and I grabbed for my water… and it was a hot day. I was really parched.

And anyway, as I put my lips on the water bottle, I thought, it’s a bit salty, sweet and salty. And I thought, oh, maybe the last time I drank from this, I had salt and vinegar chips or something. I don’t know, like maybe there was something on my mouth that made it, that left some residue there.

Anyway, I drank half the bottle. I put it back in the holder and then just happened to glance at it, ’cause I’ve gotta find the cup holder while I’m driving. So I’m looking at the bottle as I put it in and I just saw this opaque kind of liquid all sloshing around and all sorts of things in there. And I thought, yuck, what’s just happened? And then I realized why, when you take a big gulp of water, you don’t… it’s all just going down the throat and then you don’t expect to taste anything. It’s just water.

And I could taste like sweetness and different things. And I just thought it was around the top of the bottle. But yeah, she had completely back washed it probably the night before. And oh, yuck. I didn’t know. And what it had done, it all settled in the bottom, so I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t even see it when I picked it up.

Breallyn: Until you shook it up and it looked like a snow globe.

Lyndon: Until I lifted it upside down… I’m drinking it, watching the traffic and stuff. And then put it in. I felt so ill just…

Breallyn: I feel ill just listening. I think we have to stop for the day.

Lyndon: It was the grossest thing ever. Welcome to Pain in the Arts, where the pursuit of meaningful art meets the unpredictable demands of real life. I am one of your hosts, Lyndon.

Breallyn: I happen to be the other. My name is Breallyn.

Lyndon: Welcome to the show. Alright, let’s get stuck into today’s topic. What did you bring?

Breallyn: Not a thing. It’s your turn. What are we talking about?

Lyndon: It’s my turn. It’s overdue. So we have mentioned before that we started off this whole podcast caper with a list of topics that we thought we would cover. And once again, I have not referred to that.

Breallyn: Yes. We very quickly stray from the path of sensible topic planning to the merry woodland of just bring on whatever you want.

Lyndon: Yeah, look, I haven’t abandoned that list at all. I just forget that it’s there like with all my lists and I’ve discovered I’m a person that would really benefit from see-through drawers. Ah, yes.

Breallyn: Containers that you can see into, yeah.

Lyndon: So even in the garage, no, that would be a big help. We are current… if I don’t see it, if I can’t see it, I’ve…

Breallyn: Yeah, it’s outta sight, outta mind. It’s probably the same for everyone. You’ve got the next best thing, which is labeled drawers.

Lyndon: I thought you were gonna say, which is you to tell me where they are. Yeah. I have labeled my drawers.

Breallyn: I can organize you, but I can’t force you to actually use the systems I set up.

Lyndon: Did you notice I labeled this mic?

Breallyn: Quick mic? I see that. Quick mic.

Lyndon: And the… that mic up there…

Breallyn: Oh yeah.

Lyndon: …is room mic. I know it’s a room mic. I just thought I’d label it in case one day I just went insane.

Breallyn: I like how you’ve got a whole lot of things on shelves. You actually can see and…

Lyndon: I’ve still labeled the gin.

Breallyn: You’ve labeled the gin right in front of all the bottles of gin. And what’s the worst thing about that label? It’s white. It’s white, and the others are black. They are black with white writing.

Lyndon: That’s black. Because I lent that label maker to you. Yeah. And it had the white ribbon in it, and I didn’t realize it was still in it. And once it printed out white, I thought, oh…

Breallyn: Now you could do it black. But is this the same thinking that led us to sharing a teabag?

Lyndon: You’ve got that time. I like how you… one centimeter label…You’re pointing finger that was my… that was my fault that we were… I’m pretty sure.

Breallyn: That was never my idea.

Lyndon: I’m pretty sure it would’ve been my idea, sadly and shamefully. And I know that at the time I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But you were compliant.

Breallyn: I know. What was… I know. That makes me feel bad because you’re such a strong, independent woman. Except when it comes to you suggesting idiotic things.

Speaker 2: Suggesting idiotic things. I know. Anyway.

Breallyn: Oh man. Okay, let’s change that gin label and…

Lyndon: No, it’s fine. Okay. It’s fine. It is. It’s honestly, it’s the least of my worries, but yeah. Alright, yeah, where are… where were we on my topic?

Breallyn: What is the topic? Can’t wait to hear.

Introducing the Topic: Is Deep Work Necessary for Creatives?

Lyndon: This is what I found myself asking myself. Allow me to introduce myself. Allow myself to introduce myself. Is deep work necessary?

Breallyn: Okay. We’ve talked a little bit about deep work. We’ve talked about deep work. Have we done a topic on it? We’ve talked about work, we’ve talked about getting into the important work of what’s in the heart or the soul that needs to somehow find an expression and your individual artistic thing that you wanna create.

Lyndon: There’s no getting around that we’re always in some shape and form gonna be talking about the work of creating. Okay, here’s a question for you. Why do you think this came up in my mind as a topic?

Breallyn: I think because… I think there’s an element to the idea of deep work that makes it just sound far too much like serious deadly work, whereas creativity is often about playfulness and just following the ideas that come and not feeling like you’re working. Is it that?

Lyndon: No.

Breallyn: Okay. Buzz wrong.

Lyndon: That wasn’t the… that wasn’t the reason it came up for me.

Breallyn: Okay. So why did it come up for you?

Lyndon: You know what I’ve actually done? I’ve written an intro. I’ve never done this before.

Breallyn: Oh, please do share.

Lyndon: Crikey, what are we in some sort of Victorian era?

Breallyn: Indeed. I meant to say production. Do share. Do share.

Lyndon: It’s like we’re on the set of Annie or something, or what is it? Anne of Green Gables, or…

Breallyn: Oh, I love Anne of Green Gables.

Lyndon: …or the famous five. Okay. I shall do share.

Breallyn: I’m so glad I sound like I’m in Anne of Green Gables.

Lyndon: Just as a side note, if you try and sound like your normal speaking voice while you’re reading, it’s so difficult.

Breallyn: I know, because you have a reading voice.

Lyndon: That’s right. What’s with that?

Breallyn: Because you’re not thinking the sentences, you’re reading them. You’re trying to do that as you go along.

Lyndon: Do you learn that at Melbourne Uni when you’re doing your thesis?

Breallyn: No, but I tell you when it’s really hit me in the face is doing the promos for a bit of voiceover work that we’ve been doing as a side hustle. And man, that is hard to get right. I can tell you.

Lyndon: Takes a bit of practice.

Breallyn: Yep.

Lyndon: Okay. I personally find that allowing myself at least three hours of dedicated undistracted time ensures I get through some of the more creative and time-consuming aspects of recording music. It helps me wrestle back momentum and keep a project alive. Recently, I’ve noticed that if other tasks encroach on my deep work window and I’m faced with reduced blocks of time, I’ll often unfairly stress over my lack of discipline, or I’ll minimize the potential of a now smaller window of time.

This often leads to dismissal of that time as an opportunity for deep work, and I’ll often reassign it to more menial tasks, leaving the creative work I otherwise would’ve done dormant.

Breallyn: Interesting.

Lyndon: …the validity of deep work, I suspect it’s not the only answer to undisturbed focus and productivity, especially where artistic endeavor is concerned, which is what you were saying before. So it just made me wonder about… are there alternatives or is it a mix of approaches? Obviously it comes down to personality type. I realized my approach to things just generally on a day-to-day basis is a bit manic.

Breallyn: You don’t say.

Lyndon: So even when I’m being quite… so apart from deep work stuff where I’m quite calm and focused for extended periods. Outside of that, if I don’t enter into any deep work state or whatever else it might be called, I do dart around. Is that a word? Yeah. Is that what Little Birds do? Those little ones that look like the ones that die young from a heart attack or they get scared off their branch. Yeah, I dart around from one thing to the next and a bit manic or I’m very docile, so I realized if I was a character, I would be Rango.

Breallyn: Oh yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. Rango.

Breallyn: Yeah. I love Rango.

Lyndon: That’s a great movie. Yeah. So I think I’m… yeah, I think I’m Rango. ’cause he’s so lackadaisical and laissez-faire and not phased by anything and then he’s just completely erratic and yeah, panic. It falls on the right side of luck too, so maybe…

Breallyn: Let’s hope that I’m looking at you. There you go.

Lyndon: But what character would you be?

Breallyn: Oh Man. Would I be Bugs Bunny? I quite like Bugs. He just seems to…

Lyndon: Bugs Bunny.

Breallyn: …be quite happily doing his thing. Figuring stuff out. Smart… he was smart and quite calm. And as in the intelligent, like Daffy Duck was just running rings around him doing all sorts of ideas and schemes and that and Bugs just cruised on through.

Lyndon: I had more of an affinity with Daffy.

Breallyn: Daffy was much more likable. But which life would I like to lead? I think Bugs’. And actually my nickname growing up was Bugs. Oh, there we go. That’s great. Yeah.

Lyndon: The first half of your life, I guess you’re trying to figure out who you are and you’re aiming to be someone, and then at some point you have to accept who you are in this world of striving to be the best version of yourself and whatnot. At some point you go, is any of that really doable? This self rubbish? We are who we are. I know, and it’s… you try to shake… I’m Rango… yourself for a lot.

Breallyn: You do, yeah. You try to figure out who you want to be and how you would like to approach things, and then over time, some of that might stick or it might work for you, but then a lot of it may be not. It’s more of an ideal that then you’re just beating yourself against that wall that you’ve created.

Lyndon: Acceptance is a big thing, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s acceptance and just being kind to yourself.

Breallyn: Yeah. And that it takes time and it’s very hard when you are young to even know yourself, let alone be able to accept that horrifying realization of who you are.

Lyndon: Yeah. We’ll stop derailing my subject. Pretty sure you don’t need help in that department. What you were saying earlier about the idea of deep work is not necessarily associated with creative arts is probably true because I think when Cal Newport coined the phrase… I think they were the first person to coin the phrase deep work. It was associated with academia and technical fields. Yep.

But I guess for me, my interpretation of that is, it’s me saying, this time of my day is sacred and I don’t want any distractions. I don’t wanna distract myself. And so it’s about the environment and it’s about the head space and there is a little bit of what do you call it? When you’re treating it as sacred time, you build it up to be this thing. And then if it gets reduced for me, I’m like, oh, that can’t…

Breallyn: …yeah, it’s gone now.

Lyndon: I can’t do anything creative, which isn’t true. But yeah, I have found myself in those times going, I don’t have the three hours that I needed or that I thought I needed. So I’m just gonna do some editing. Yeah. Or I’m going to do something else that’s loosely related to what I wanted to do or it’s just another… I’ll just move on to this other project.

Yeah. And I just thought actually that’s not right because I know there are plenty of times where I’ve managed to be productive in a lesser space of time. It’s more just this ideal and striving for productive time.

Breallyn: I think productive time, it feels good when you do have that time. A three hour block is a good amount for sure. And going back to the term deep work. Yeah. Probably not used by artists. Traditionally, it’s more like they’ll speak about when the muse strikes and things like that. There’s this more… it happens when it happens and once the inspiration hits, then jump into that work and you lose track of time at that point.

So when you know you’ve got other responsibilities, you don’t wanna have to pull yourself out of that time. So you wanna make sure that before you even allow yourself to get sucked into it, you’ve got a good window of space in order to do that creating. So yeah, I think three hours is definitely a good time for me, for sure.

I’d like to try to jump into work as soon as I can in the morning knowing that yeah, I’ve got probably around four or five hours that I can work and then have to pick up the… the end of the day, things… pick up Birdie from her bus and so on.

Lyndon: Yeah, I guess there is some romanticism involved that I’m gonna do my best work in those times. Yeah, perhaps.

Breallyn: But also, I don’t know if you find this, and maybe this is more because of the kind of work I’m doing day to day now, I’m working on client’s work often in my day to day. So this is aside and apart from the longer project I have going, which is writing a novel. And writing a novel, once I’m into it, once I’m into the characters and so on, I can work in shorter bursts of time because I’m still in that head space, the consistency of the project is continuing.

I can make some headway in some way. I can plan out a scene or I can even just practice writing in a character’s voice or something like that. So it’s worth it to work in those smaller bursts. But I sometimes find, depending on where I am in a project, it’s actually not worth using, say, an hour, because when I am about to create a website for somebody, I need to do the first hour and a half, sometimes two hours, just getting all of the information.

I’ve done research on their industry, on their competitors, on their ideal clients, on their business itself and all of their services and all the… all of these things I’m holding in my mind all at the same time.

And then I can actually begin the work of creating their thing, that piece of writing. But if I’ve only got an hour, all I can do is collate all those things in my mind and then I have to stop. And then the next day I’ll still have to do that work all over again.

Lyndon: I can’t retain it. So not the research, but just the collating or…

Breallyn: Yeah, and just getting my head around it. It ferments in my mind a bit until I have a unique voice for that client and I know I have the sense of how that… you know how it’s gonna be outlayed, like the structure and what needs to be said, and then I’m into it. And then, I’m off and running. I’m working and obviously, I come across little speed humps along the way, or something’s not working, or I need to rewrite something or redo something.

But yeah, I definitely need that big timeframe. And then of course, there’s the times that you don’t have it, so yeah. I don’t start a big chunk of work in that time. I will use it for editing or for, yeah, finishing something or whatever.

Lyndon: So I guess it… part of it is time management, isn’t it? Not in the sense of you’ve gotta be better with your time, but just in going, I don’t have the time I thought I would have to do it, so I’m gonna do this. Yeah. It’s not the end of the world. I think what’s devastating for me is when I’ve… so you were talking about the research you’ve done and through hours of work leading up to it, you are able to then get a tone of voice for the piece that you’re going to write.

And I guess that thing can happen with me where I get an idea or some clarity on something and I go, that’s what I’m gonna do tomorrow. I’m gonna make sure I can hit the ground running because I’ve got a really strong sense of how to put this music together.

So then if that doesn’t happen and I derail it myself sometimes, but if for whatever reason that window gets shortened, that’s when it’s particularly emotionally and mentally devastating. It is because, ’cause you go, all right, now I’ve got to get all of that back again and yeah, and I might lose… give it another crack.

Breallyn: Yeah. I might lose flavor of it that I had today. I may not have that again tomorrow, or…

Lyndon: You won’t. Yeah. I think that is a fact.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Deep Work vs. Creative Inspiration: Finding Your Process

Lyndon: And we often think that… it’s like when you get that initial hit of inspiration, you always think that has got some sort of special sauce in it that if you don’t capture it or if you lose it, that the work won’t be the same and you never know whether the work’s gonna be worse off or you actually come up with something that’s not the same, but still as good. But there’s definitely… I know in the music world people are always really keen to record the initial inspiration.

Even with really simple melodies. ‘Cause simple melodies… it’s not that they’re elusive, but just to try and remember one that you had the day before is way harder, like near impossible. Yeah. Because you’re only working with a certain… isn’t… certain amount of notes. Yeah. And it’s how you… it’s where you place them. It’s in your mind. It’s the other chords maybe or notes that they were rubbing up against. It’s where you accent them.

There’s so many like little nuances that you don’t realize you’re doing, so you have to record it and then listen back. Even in the studio, first and second takes are often the ones where the magic is, so to speak. Yeah. And I would know, ’cause I’m one of these people that go over and over and over and then go, actually you know what, the first take I did, it wasn’t perfect, but man, it is so much better yeah than my 130th take. So, yeah.

Breallyn: That’s right. It captures that element of the inspiration and it’s almost like the first bit of writing, and I do this as well, if I’m rewriting something, it might be more polished, it might come together better, but it won’t have the magic of the discovery that you’re doing as you are writing that first thing or as you might be playing that first thing.

There’s the element that you’re teaching it to yourself and you’re discovering it yourself as you go. Whereas when you’re rewriting or redoing or doing a different take or whatever, what you’re doing. So that element is gone. You might have Yeah, just a bit more polished to it and a bit more practice to it. But you may have lost some of that bit of magic along the way.

Lyndon: I know for me, I’d start focusing on the details that… the aspects of what I played that make it speak. Yeah. But I’ll be thinking about, I don’t know the choice of notes rather than how I arrived at them physically. It’s hard to explain, I guess when you’re playing an instrument, one of the things that over many years of playing what you develop is an approach to the instrument that is nearly like your version of making it speak.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of imitation of language in a way, and in the same way that a child just learns the language from being immersed in it. You’re not thinking about it like you would be when you’ve got to learn Italian in year eight. Yeah. It’s the same I think, instrument. And that’s how people develop their own sort of style and that.

So when you do your first or your second take, all of those things are happening naturally and they are in the other takes as well. But it’s just that your brain starts thinking about your choice of notes and all these other things and you lose a little bit of what actually makes you as a player. Yeah. I think, yeah. Yeah.

Breallyn: That makes sense.

Lyndon: But that does make me think too about this idea that like maybe a way to look at it when we’ve got less time than we wanted is acknowledging that even when we’ve only got a small window of time to create something, great things can happen in that time because what we are bringing into that time is years of experience and years of learning and years of practice.

And even though we ideally wanted to have this deep work window or our precious time, or our holy grail time, we could actually create something everlasting in a much smaller window. Because we’re not coming to it with nothing.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, recall doing some writing exercises where you’d have a certain amount of time to write something and then that time gets halved and then that time gets halved again. Oh. And yeah, it’s a great way of practicing sort of distilling those thoughts and finding the essence of what you wanna create or what you wanna write just much quicker, you cutting out all the little byways and so on that you might have meandered down.

Which can be really great and really important. But yeah, if you’ve got a window of time, maybe no matter how big that is, yeah, just use it anyway. Just use… just do it and not discount what you might create or maybe, yeah, approach it differently. Like maybe I need to do that even in my daily work. Like not go, it’s useless because I’ve gotta do X, Y, and Z.

Lyndon: Part of it is probably ’cause the work we do is surrounded by so much other work. If the only thing you had to do… this is completely unrealistic. That idea of you’re just living in a cabin in the woods and you’re a painter.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: You’re a landscape painter.

Breallyn: Can we please go to the woods and have a cabin and become landscape painters?

Lyndon: Oh, can you imagine? It’s like composting toilets. No electricity. Can a running water… those things.

Breallyn: Yeah. We’ve done that sort of thing before. That was what our plan was. We were gonna build a house that pretty much was like that, weren’t we?

Lyndon: Yeah. It wasn’t gonna be off grid necessarily.

Breallyn: No. We were gonna have electricity, but I do remember talk of composting toilets.

Lyndon: Oh yeah. The Clivus Multrum.

Breallyn: Maybe. That’s so… there we go. There was a window into you back then. You’d already researched the toilet that we were gonna get…

Lyndon: The Clivus Multrum before we yeah… ever. When I stayed in that tiny house in Tassie, they had a composting toilet.

Breallyn: Did you check under the rim for the brand?

Lyndon: I did. And I was like, it’s not a Clivus Multrum. I’ll be the judge of how good this composting loo is. And it was pretty good.

Breallyn: Right? Yeah. There you go. Yeah.

Lyndon: You just had to drop in a handful of paper shavings or wood shavings or something. I think it was. You just dropped that in afterwards. Yeah. There’s no smell. I wouldn’t advise people look down into the toilet. That’s not pleasant. Ever.

Breallyn: Did you do that?

Lyndon: Tried not to, but I did. ’cause I was curious ’cause I thought…

Breallyn: Because you were researching.

Lyndon: I don’t… I think we should get off this subject ’cause I’ve just thought of some gross things I’ve seen when we’ve been camping. But anyway.

Breallyn: Moving on.

Lyndon: When we’re talking about being creative in the time that we’ve got and not making a deep work window the be all and end all. How much of it is to do with mind shift? Like being able to… to have a particular mindset that you’re always implementing, or… I don’t think I could do that. I think I would need to be more in the moment going, alright, I’m feeling really bad that I don’t have the time that I expected to have.

Then a different mindset kicks in rather than go, all right, it’s just not gonna be worth it. Now I’ll just do this other thing which I have to get done anyway, the other thing. But it’s more of, should I press on and go, that’s fine. You can still achieve a lot in an hour and a half.

The Importance of Preparation and Mental Incubation

Breallyn: I think it’s definitely a shift, and I think maybe one of the reasons why it’s hard to make that shift is because perhaps even unconsciously we are preparing for that three hour window or however long, or that time, like for quite a long time beforehand. I’ll be doing it the day before, as soon as I wake up. Everything’s geared towards me feeling ready when that window opens. I’ve got stuff done. I’ve prepared the workspace or I’ve organized the other sort of responsibilities around this time.

So the preparation actually can go on for quite a bit. And even just, I don’t know, all sorts of little things about… I dunno, I feel like I open little windows in my mind about a character or about something. I’m ready to explore it in that deep work phase. So I just give myself a little teaser. I don’t wanna think too much about it beforehand, but I wanna open that window up a little bit so that I’m ready.

But then if you don’t have that time and everything gets turned around and yes, something happens that you can’t work, all of that preparation work… it’s not just a matter of going, oh, I’ll just do it in an hour and a half now or an hour. It’s actually all of that preparation work has to shift and you have to re-prepare. So it is about changing your mindset, but it’s not just as simple as, get over it and use the hour you’ve got. It’s probably about recognizing how much that preparation work is happening for a start and how much it matters in you being able to then start that work.

Lyndon: Yeah. ’cause that’s like an incubation period, isn’t it?

Breallyn: Yeah, it really is when that stuff’s happening. Yeah.

Lyndon: So like away from the times where the rubber hits the road, where you are actually in the process of creating, fashioning it. Fashioning the idea as I say, moving the project along. So for me, like it would be the recording phase, say, yeah. You can’t do that recording phase in the incubation period or… but then you can do it without having to be fully immersed. It can be quite a practical exercise as well. If I’ve done the work beforehand.

Breallyn: The right preparation.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. And not always, it’s just that it’s… I’m just thinking of that mindset of where I’m coming into it. It’s like being able to acknowledge that, see, this was a big thing for me when I was younger, was realizing that when I’m not hands on practicing or creating or writing, the time away isn’t wasted.

Yeah, the ability to separate myself from that and relax, have fun, meet people, all these things that you shouldn’t have to have second thoughts about. All of that stuff, when you come back to your studio or back to your instrument or back to writing, you’re bringing all that part of the world back with you.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: At… and at the very least, you’re coming back refreshed or with a different perspective. And so even when you’re not actively trying to solve a problem in your mind or create characters or get in some sort of zen state or whatever. Even when you’re not doing that, the work is still benefiting from you just being a human. Yeah.

When you’ve gone through a stage thinking about it, ideas have been percolating and you’re getting some breakthroughs, which you know, you can now impart into the recording or into the writing or whatever, and that gets taken away from you. That’s where that mind shift’s really hard to do, isn’t it?

Mindset Shifts: Adapting When Creative Time Shrinks

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Yep. And it’s definitely about a reframing. Maybe it’s something if it’s happening often, like that window of time or that time you hoped for is getting taken by something else, maybe just by the nature of it happening more frequently, you get better at making that adjustment to oh, okay, I’ve gotta flip now that preparation that I did for that time, I now need to change that. Or I need to re-prepare quickly.

And maybe it is about finding how you can do the same work or the same sort of work or begin that work in the timeframe. Or maybe it’s even having a little something else up your sleeve to go, I know I can’t work on that main thing there, but there’s these other surrounding things. And they also need preparation. They also need their important allotted time. And maybe that’s one of the things I could do.

Lyndon: I think when people see me at my worst, so when I’m driving in the car and I’m getting really impatient with everyone, possibly swearing, it’s not personal. So if people are seeing me…

Breallyn: We are all swearing in our house.

Real-Life Interruptions and Managing Creative Frustration

Lyndon: It’s not personal. It’s because I’ve had some of my precious time reduced, hilarious. And I had to then go out and do something and meet someone or pick something up or… yeah, it does bring out… oh yeah… some interesting traits, doesn’t it?

Breallyn: Of course. You feel robbed.

Lyndon: We take… I take myself too seriously.

Breallyn: No, I do the same thing, just yeah. Little stomp out the door, swearing my head off because I’m having to deal with all these other things that are important and so on, and yeah. I think I was having a big whinge to you last night that I’ve got several work projects up in the air. Not enough days in the week to do them. No time at all for my own creative writing.

And even if… I think I was even going, oh, I’m just gonna have to work all Sunday. And then we realized, oh, there’s no carer for our daughter on Sunday at all. So already that’s a full day of caring. Oh, so, not anyone… Sunday night.

Lyndon: Okay.

Breallyn: Yeah. So you… I’ve got a plan a yeah, a full day. And I’m also on all the night shifts at the moment as well. Yeah. With our daughter. And even my little… I said even my little window of time I had to drive to pick our son up. And often I would get to listen to a podcast at that time and it’s like a little bit of me time, but instead I was on the phone talking to the behavioral specialist for our daughter and doing this planning stuff and talking about the report and so all of that.

Yeah. I was furious last night trying to go, there’s no time for anything. I can’t even… I don’t even have time for work, let alone anything happy that I really wanna do. Yeah.

Lyndon: Happy you still managed to sit down with a glass of wine.

Breallyn: Absolutely. And watch an episode of, I dunno, something. Yeah, I hit the wall and just went, I’m not gonna work now. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do.

Lyndon: Oh yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah, I realized I’d been stressed and working since 5:00 AM.

Lyndon: Speaking of Nordic noir series…

Breallyn: No. I was not watching Nordic Noir. That’s your little genre you love.

Lyndon: I’ve finished all four seasons of The Bridge. Yes. And definitely well worth it. Highly recommended. Yeah.

Breallyn: But you say that, you say highly recommended. Not only have you told me to watch it, you’ve now told our listeners and what’s happening in about four days? SBS is taking it off because it’s been up already, so Yeah. I’m sure none of us have the chance.

Lyndon: I’m sure. Yeah. You know what, it’s probably seven or eight years old, so it’s probably on any number of platforms. Okay. That was just the one I was choosing to watch it on.

Breallyn: For four seasons. Yeah.

Lyndon: Four seasons not bad. Yeah. Yeah. We should probably wrap this conversation up because I’m thinking that It’s not our modus operandi to be coming up with solutions. We’re really just…

Breallyn: We just talk about the problem and then leave you with it. Yeah. But look, tell us about how you guys solve it. We’d like to hear your… but seriously though.

Lyndon: Just name any artist that you know of historically and how they worked and they’re all different.

Breallyn: Oh, exactly.

Finding Flexibility: Is Strict Deep Work Always the Answer?

Lyndon: Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Everyone’s different. It’s really just about finding your own style and I guess that’s why it came up for me. It was like, hang on a minute. I’ve put so much… so much currency I guess on… on this deep work kind of idea. And yeah, I do benefit from deep work, but if I don’t get it when I need it, I can still work and still get these meaningful bodies of work done.

Breallyn: Yeah. It’s definitely about the mix of things, isn’t it? I think if you get none of those nice big windows and you really can never get into it, the work would suffer from it. You do need them. Yeah. But maybe it is about embracing the… any… like any window that comes along, any time spent, anything that you can get down, it’s all valuable and it will all go towards shaping the end result and maybe shaping it differently to how you thought.

But each creative project is… it’s capturing something, it’s a record of that time of your life as well as the idea that you initially had. Yeah, the colors those smaller windows bring to the work actually might enhance it in a way that you didn’t envisage when you first started.

Lyndon: Didn’t expect. Yeah. I’m now trying to think of historical figures that I actually know anything about of their work habits. Yeah. You did make it sound like you’d… I was gonna launch into the… no. Okay. So who painted the Sistine Chapel? When Pro Hart painted the Sistine Chapel. He would’ve needed a massive deep work window. But yeah. Anyway, so Picasso was erratic. Pro Hart was messy.

Breallyn: Pro Hart. We all know he just spilled stuff on carpets. Remember that ad? Yeah. That was a big formation of our childhood understanding of art.

Lyndon: Pro Hart.

Breallyn: Putting sauce and spaghetti stuff on…

Lyndon: And whipped cream and whatever else on carpet. And then it being what vacuumed up or what was the… was he selling vacuum cleaners?

Breallyn: The ad was, yeah, that he just came to a carpet and just spilled stuff all over it and made a big sort Pro Hart what a mess. Painting of a prawn. Yeah, that’s right. And the cleaning lady of course came along and cleaned it all up and I guess, I think it was Stain Master Carpets.

Lyndon: Oh really? Oh, so it was, yeah. Okay. So the ad was for the carpet, that doesn’t matter what you spill on it, it can be cleaned. Stain Master. That’s actually genius when you think about it, getting Pro Hart involved in that.

Breallyn: Yeah. And look, he’s us talking about it 20 years later.

Lyndon: 30 years later, maybe a long time later. Alright, that was an interesting chat. I’m sure I’ve learned something.

Breallyn: You’re supposed to be teaching us something.

Lyndon: Oh, no, I’m not. Okay. No, not at all. Good. I’m definitely not. That didn’t happen.

Breallyn: Oh, no.

Lyndon: No one learnt a thing. And that’s exactly how I like it. All I’ve done is just add to the confusion.

Breallyn: So thank you for joining us in Pain in the Arts. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yep. You’ve been listening to Pain in the Arts, the Masters of Confusion, the masters of throwing our hands up in the air and going, I don’t know. Do you know?

Final Thoughts & How to Connect

Lyndon: Thanks for listening today to our podcast. Now, if you jump onto patreon.com and find us on there, Pain in the Arts Life, you can join as a free member and you will have access to all our unfiltered episodes. So the unfiltered episodes are basically unedited versions of what you are listening to at the moment. So it’s as we recorded it with all the extra banter, the little sideways shuffles that we do.

Breallyn: Every garden path we walk down.

Lyndon: So yeah, they’re fun. So they’re up there. And also the first episode of In Search of Home that is a podcast that Brea is doing her personal journey of writing the novel, No Word For Home. And the first episode of Echoes of Home is also available to free members. And that is my podcast where I am talking about the writing of the music, scoring the audio book for No Word For Home and anything else that I happen to be working on that I care to talk about and indulge myself in indeed.

So those things are up there on Patreon. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. That would be a massive help. And we’ve got actually on Spotify at the moment, there is another feed of ours called Pain In The Arts, Patreon Bonus Episodes. So that’s all on Spotify at the moment. What else can we talk about? What else can we steer you in the direction of? We’ve got some blogs up actually on our website. Yep. Pain in the Arts Life, pain in the Arts Life. ’cause that’s what we’re living.

Breallyn: Come live it with us.

Lyndon: Yeah. So that’s about it. I am gonna sign off and talk to you all next week. See you next time. Bye.

Want more deep dives into the creative process? Our Patreon supporters get exclusive episodes and behind-the-scenes content.