Benched Week 60: the quicksand of time

Out of the beach before me rose a great, metal foot, dully gleaming under overcast skies.  Farther on, an arm and hand had emerged.  Near it, the head of the giant, silently screaming.

I say emerged, but in fact – as I have learned in my years of illustrating – capturing a motion in a single pose is tricky.  One can never be sure that what is being pictured is actually the doing rather than the undoing.  The giant could very well be sinking.



Which is how I felt as I sat on a nearby bench and ruminated on the sculpture.  I was sinking.

I had come to the National Harbor in Washington, D.C., with scarcely half an hour to spare before meeting the woman with whom I was to scribe an event.  It had been a hectic week of work and travel, and I felt like I was being swallowed up by the quicksand of my own schedule.












Creativity and busyness have a love-hate relationship. Calvin, in his usual perceptive way, puts his finger on the core tension.

There is an inertia that needs to be overcome in order to make one’s flitting imaginings concrete.  But there is a point where a level of activity undermines that output.

Here – let me show you how this works in my life using my simple Activometer.

Boredom, like gravity, requires an escape velocity.  Work has to ramp up to a medium-high level in order to get the synapses firing.  I’m sure you’ve found this to be true.  There is an optimal place on your meter where you’re the most productive.  For me, it’s just below the breaking point.

After that point – in the danger zone – I get too busy to be innovative.  Breakthroughs get trumped by just getting through.  Excellence is replaced by good enough.  This zone is perhaps the greatest reason why fast-food restaurants thrive.  If only they’d be honest and put on their signs: When You Only Have Time for Good Enough.

The obvious solution?  Leave more margin in the schedule.  To change analogies, we make our own tethers.  We can untie them.

So, scale back the busyness, Bruce.  Put the marker down and no one gets hurt.

We can all rise above that sinking feeling.