I’m almost a month into the 2020 Vision experiment, and I’m at the point where I… kind of regret it…? That’s not right, not really; the brief of posting a different image every work day has been something that’s been rewarding in a bunch of ways and has produced a few things I like in retrospect, so saying that I regret it is arguably too strong. But it has far, far more difficult than I’d originally expected.
As I initially conceived, I’d spend half an hour or so every morning before settling down to work to come up with something; it would be an exercise to get my brain going and in a different way than I’d spend the rest of the day, working with visuals instead of with words. In theory, it all made sense — not least because a year of doing the THR newsletter graphics had helped me realize much I enjoyed flexing those muscles, and to what degree it could get my brain nice and loose for writing.
The problem is that reality does not play well with the theory. Which, honestly, I should have expected.
Really, the biggest issue is that I generally have to start work when I start work. When I sit at the desk, I’ve already got a backlog of emails to handle, and usually at least one deadline immediately staring me in the face, so the idea that I have half an hour to noodle feels like a quaint notion a more innocent me, foolishly. What was I thinking…?
Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that I hadn’t considered that, the significant difference between this project and the newsletter graphics was the lack of someone telling me what to do. There’s no headline given to me for this, and some mornings, that feels like the biggest change in the world; I sit there thinking, I have no idea what to do and feel utterly defeated.
I’ve thought about dropping my self-imposed target to three images a week instead of five, or dropping the entire project all together at the end of the month. But I’m not quite there just yet; I want to struggle awhile longer, to see what happens when it switches from a struggle to a routine (if it switches from a struggle to a routine), and what happens when I get over my self-consciousness and let it become the visual diary it was intended to be.
We’ll see what happens next.