Staying sane in an unpredictable career landscape

How do you professionalize your creative practice as legitimate, meaningful work?

By punching out. You need a ritual of leave taking at the end of your workday. Doing so sets healthy boundaries to demarcate the line between personal and professional.

One the inventions from my innovation gameshow took this idea to a whole new level. Here’s the ad copy for the commercial for my new product:

Creative people have always needed a way to treat their art as working class job, but there’s no physical way to commemorate that. Until now.

Punchly is a wall mounted time clock that helps professional artists embrace a blue collar mindset and professionalize their creative practice. Combining modern industrial design with the latest smartphone technology, our product makes it easy for artists to clock in and clock out of their pretend workday.

Plus, our compatible cloud communications technology is is directly connected to your social media applications, that way it’s fun and easy to compete with your other unemployed artists friends to see whose workaholism is most severe.

Clock in before your slacker friends, and you can earn badges and unlock new features! Punchly helps you clock in, make art, and clock out.

Despite most of my ideas being absurd, offensive and impractical, this is one I’d actually like to see come to fruition.

For many years, I kept a classic hotel concierge call bell on my desk. And every day when I finished my mission piece, I slammed my hand bell as hard as I could.

Initially, it was sort of a joke. But what I found was, the physical movement of hitting the bell combined with the piercing chime that echoed through the room was deeply satisfying.

In a career landscape where nothing is predictable or stable, discipline is the only thing creative people have control over. From your clients to your coworkers to industry trends to emerging technology, being an artist in the modern world can be a daunting quest.

Particularly for those creators who work out of their homes. Boundaries don’t exist. Ultimately, punching out is what helps the professional place punctuation marks throughout your day to gain a sense of normalcy and rhythm.

That’s where prolificacy lives.

How do you know where you end and the work begins?