The Role of White Space In Your Freelance Career

So we're talking about the importance and the usefulness, the practicality, of white space, and not just as a design element, but as an overall concept that will help you sustain your business over the long term.

As a designer and illustrator, I tend to see everything from a design point of view, and I've written articles and teach about the necessity of white space to achieve focus, to set priorities, in other words, create hierarchy, and also rest.

Designs very often will need a place for the eyes to rest.

I'm now going to bring up a concept I dealt with in an earlier episode about including white space in designing your life.

So we're gonna be talking about time off, rest, recreation, and the concept of Sabbath.

First, I wanna look at reasons we don't tend to take time off, and I'm speaking out of [laughs] my own experience, because I'm very guilty on most of these, if not all.

We have deadlines.

We're working on multiple projects at various stages, and we have deadlines, and sometimes those deadlines require to stay up late or rise early or both or not hit the horizontal at all.

Freelancers tend to live and move by deadlines.

When we don't have project work, we use the time between projects to catch up on business things and do personal projects.

We're afraid of falling behind.

We're afraid that if we let up that we will have less clients or have less projects, be less successful, so there's this kind of hustle idea that many freelancers pursue.

If we take time off, we might miss a client, we might lose a client.

But time off is crucial, and there's a reason for it, and I've talked, I've written about work/life balance.

I call it work/life integration, because there are seasons in your life where you're going to be spending more time on building your business, running your business, and serving clients, and there will be other seasons in your life where you're going to be focusing more on family and personal life, personal development, and things like that, and it's not a day-to-day shift.

It's not a week-to-week shift.

It's not a workweek versus weekend concept.

It's basically a seasonal thing.

The various stages of your business require certain commitments of time and effort.

Building a family also requires certain commitments of time and effort, and so you're integrating the two, and it's not a symmetric balance, it's asymmetry, which is also balance, it's just a more dynamic, more fluid type of balance, just like the design principle of asymmetry.

But time off, in any case, downtime, is crucial.

The purpose of white space or downtime is to bring focus to the objective.

Without being able to step away from what you're doing and look at it objectively, you're in the middle of things, and you can't see where you are very easily.

You can't see what's going on.

You can't make assessments and judgments about what to do next or where to pivot or what needs to be changed and things like that.