Don't get lost in the details
Our brains are lazy. Too much stimulus or overworking and they shut down. They go blank. Sometimes your brain needs a breather to be brilliant.
When it comes to creative work, everyone operates differently. Some are plodders, some are investigators. Some rely on last-minute inspiration or an obsession with the data. Others need to bounce ideas off people or lock themselves away from the world for a while. But, while we all work in different fashions, one shared fact remains: your brain can only take so much.
It’s a processing unit, after all. And when it’s got too much to process, it stops processing. Couldn’t be simpler.
The most important thing you can do in this situation is to get fresh eyes on it. It’s like when you’re doing a sudoku. You can be staring at that little grid for hours and it just won’t click. Then, the moment someone else looks at it, it’s immediately obvious. An instantaneous solve. And you can’t help but think ‘if mine were the fresh eyes coming to the sudoku, would I have seen it so quickly?’.
It’s the same with so many things. The presentation you read and re-read for hours with its page one typo. The magic eye that won’t reveal its magic to your eye. And the creative you can’t quite see the full picture of. It’s the same with the creative work of our industry – you zoom in, you lose the big picture.
Sometimes, you need someone else to take a look. Even a passing glance will usually reveal something you missed. Which is why it’s worthwhile getting extra eyes involved.
Ad god David Ogilvy said
Don’t be too proud or too precious to let a colleague show you what’s right under your nose – it doesn’t mean the work is any less yours. It’s just more likely to be accurate to your original vision.
They don’t even necessarily have to say anything – sometimes just the presence of another person can be enough to shift your thinking from ‘creator’ mode to ‘viewer’ mode, letting you finally see what everyone else sees.
When you’re mired in the minutiae of your work, it’s hard to keep your original thinking at front of mind. It’s easy to get so engrossed in the painting of the hands that you forget to do a head. To go so deep into wedding place settings that you forget to invite anyone. To get so distracted by booking perfect accommodation that you forget to book flights. The worst thing you can do is plough away and lost lose sight of the strategy.
When you’re up to your eyes in the particulars, the master plan always suffers.
So get someone to sense check it. Make sure the parts are all aligned and the message you want to transmit is the one that’s going out.
Don’t get lost in the details.
