Managing Downtime🕐

You might be entering the industry and looking for your first job, or have a gap in between contracts or are re-entering the industry after a break. Whatever the case, I’m pretty damn sure that every single freelancer has had downtime in their career. Usually, it wasn’t planned nor was it wanted. and could be quite scary. So lemme give you some tips cuz you bet that as an audio freelancer in indie games, I’ve had my fair share of downtime (RIP). We’re going to cover:

• Misconceptions and Realities⁉

• Inflation💹

• Be Your Producer🕵️‍♀️

• No Wait Stop!🤚🏽

Misconceptions and Realities🌗

So you’re in-between projects or your wrapped up your latest contract and now…there’s nothing to do. You say “Finally! I have all the time in the world, time to complete ALL my side projects, update my CV, revamp my website and make a new reel, YEAH!”.

Great attitude, love the positivity but let’s break this down realistically:

You might think that you have all the time in the world. You do 8h of work at the office so you’ll be doing the same at home right? FALSE! The typical 9-5 grossly inflates how much focused work you actually do. There’s been MULTIPLE researches and studies showing that office workers typically only have 3-4 focused hours on their work. The rest is spent:

• Checking news/socials

• Watercooler talk

• Making coffee/tea

• Talking with colleagues

• Family calls

• Waiting for meetings

• Hell even looking for another job

Unless you’re a factory worker or someone on the front lines, you are not consistently doing 8h of work a day. Sure there might be a couple intensive days or weeks, but it ain’t constant. A cool exercise to do is to track your time harshly and honestly with a time tracker. I used Toggle and yikes was it eye opening. In the beginning I tracked literally every time I did an ALT-TAB to some random website (yes that includes ur faves like IGN/Kotaku, in most cases, it isn’t immediately relevant to your task!!), every bathroom break, snack time, lunch prepping, ALL OF IT. At first I hated it because it made me feel embarassed. On a good day I could maybe lock in 4h of work. Otherwise, unless I had a major deadline or had to do some last minute fixes for a build, I never got over the 3-4h. People think they work 8h a day but they usually don’t.

At most, you might have a 4h work day. Having that framework will help you plan your tasks realistically. When you keep overestimating how much you can accomplish in a given set of time, it leads to disappointment. And in the long term, that leads to demoralization. It’s a known fact that we have a tendency to underestimate how long a job takes… So on that note: let’s move onto planning!

Be Your Own Producer✔™

If you were in a structured team, you probably had a producer coordinating your team, planning sprints and attending stand ups. But now you’re on your own and you have to plan your days weeks. The freedom might feel great until you realize that it never feels like you’re ‘productive enough’. Well you see, when you don’t track any of your tasks and accomplishments, the sense of infinite work will quickly engulfe you. So time to your put on your producer hat! Let’s first start with:

Creating Your Motivation😤

• Plan the Big → Define your goals in broader 1-2 words

• Bread down those goals into several tasks

• Time Estimate your tasks → This SHOULD take a while, it’s hard to do!

Creating Your Expectations📊

• Trial and error: You won’t be creating perfect time estimates. You definitely will mess up so this will be an ongoing practice. It only gets better with time unfortunately, no way to speed run it!

• Introspection: Break down your trial and error results. What worked best when and why?! Get to know yourself!

• Give yourself grace: You can’t always have the most productive days. I’m writing this on a moot day ha!

You are your own human experiment🥂

(I might have been watching too much of the Good Doctor). Look my point here is that having downtime and structuring your own work days is a great experiment at understanding your likes and dislikes. Hey without that structured 9-5 you might find that there other times during the day that work better for you. Perhaps you need an afternoon walk after lunch, or to simply start working in the afternoon instead of the traditional morning! Whatever it is, working by yourself during a downtime is a great way to learn more about yourself.

No Wait Stop!🤚🏽

Okay so you have all these goals you want to accomplish, you scoped them out and now it’s time for never ending work! estimated tasks, make your producer proud ❤

Wait a sec! Overwork ca happen outside of a full time job. You might feel that since you have all this ‘extra time’, it must be filled. But that can be a slippery slope… Did you just come off a heavy project? Maybe it’s time to rest. You’re in the middle of switching from one company to another? You don’t need to fill in that gap right away. It’s okay to take a breather. Not every downtime is meant to be filled. The games industry is incredibly competititive, especially considering the current state of the industry. It might feel like you need to always be doing something, but it doesn’t mean you should. Rest and time away from your craft can do wonders for you in the long term.

Anyways, you decided what’s best for you! I just wanted to make sure I add in that rest is important, even during downtime.

That’s it! Thanks for reading. I’m off to BitSummit next month so there may or may not be an article. I purposefully didn’t call it a monthly newsletter because I’m terrified of disappointing ya’ll. So anyways who knows! If you got change to spare, I’d appreciate a donation. This newsletter will always be free (it costs me money to run this heh).