Play: a productive pastime

Why you need to waste time playing

Published in

Shopify UX

8 min readMay 22, 2018

I spent the majority of last year waking up tired, frustrated, and with a lost appetite for almost everything. Continuous, seizure-inducing change was happening all around me and I couldn’t figure out how to thrive in the chaos. Regularly running into walls, people, and feelings, I lost confidence, focus, and energy. It was a mess.

Then one day, I remembered a chapter I read a couple of months earlier called The Colours of Grief—by Alex Charchar, and I was overwhelmed with a new king of hope to feel myself again.

In an environment of unceasing change, you’re in the perfect position to create your own constant.

Digging deeper

In this chapter, Alex talks about going through a very difficult experience that leaves everything around him hanging in shades of grey, yet slowly but surely he manages to bring colour back into his life.

“I mostly read, eating hundreds of pages at a time, tasting the words, feeling their texture in my teeth, on my tongue, not moving from my seat, fully absorbing language etched into (the) page. I wanted to be walled in by books and find escape. A safe room made impenetrable to things I did not want to feel. Yet, line by line, I was slowly revived; like a man waking after a long sleep, I was ravenous, starved for content.” [The colours of Grief, The Manuals, Vol 2]

I was going through a phase of demotivation, passion fatigue, loss of flow, direction, and interest. A phase I would dare to say all too familiar for any creative. In a nutshell, re-reading this chapter, I quickly learned that I simply needed to do… to do something, anything, and to continue doing it until I felt my identity being re-born.

Do what you’re asking ?

Devour and play

‘Divide and conquer,’ said Julius Caesar to expand the Roman Empire. Well, to you my fellow struggling creative I say, devour and play. Put aside time to [insert verb] for yourself. Yes, do things without purpose; not for work, nor for a side hustle, and not for anyone but yourself. Devouring your surroundings, and coming to a state of sharp focus over a new experiment; feeling alive and completely stimulated; buzzing with what-if’s and why’s. It’s about cultivating a time, place, and mental space for the birth of something new: new experiences, new challenges, new unknowns, and new stimulations. Soak up the world around you and bring it back to your play space. As Jim Jarmusch said,

“Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.”

This is probably why when you walk around Shopify offices, you see racks of puzzle boxes, a piano, a whole gaming room, and even a freaking Lego table! It’s about taking your mind out of the usual and expected, and nudging it to a state of mind that will help you approach work or even life differently. Gently flirting with the edges of your comfort zone or completely bulldozing them.

To catch yourself slipping into such demotivated phase, you’re looking to notice changes in your behaviour, tone, perspective, optimism or any other signs that are indicative of something being wrong or different. You make note, and you observe. What’s changed? How long have I been having these thoughts? Have they stopped me from any good habits (punctuality, good sleep, family time, etc.)? Or made me start any bad ones (4 hours of Netflix, short temper, carelessness, excessive food indulgence, etc.)? Ask yourself, have I felt present and stimulated recently?

Here, I break down the benefits of taking time to play and some tips to help you get started.

Discovery

Being deliberate about using new and different tools will give you plenty of exposure to discover new playgrounds. It is an amazing way to unbox yourself. You might even start to gravitate towards something specific and learn about what you really enjoy doing, versus what you don’t.

Confidence

Throughout this process, you give yourself many opportunities to develop new competencies, which undoubtedly lead to having more confidence in your skill offering, and creative thinking abilities. It’s an expansion to your tool box.

Failure

Whether you like it or not, free-spirited experimentation like this lines up failures one after the other. But that is good. In fact, it’s great. Better to fail here and get used to it, than to fail out in the real world and ram into the wall that is ego. Which leads me to …

Humility

It is humbling to witness yourself and all your greatness conform down to the limits of the tools you are using. Paint doesn’t float, pen isn’t erasable, and paper doesn’t fly. You learn to work within the limitations of what you have at hand. Like when a child first learns that in fact paper can fly, only first you have to fold them into paper planes.

Solitude

“When external distractions go away and we allow our minds to wander, the default mode network is working at full capacity and may play an important role in forming our sense of identity.” [Headspace blog]

With this time you have the opportunity to listen to what’s going on inside your head. Shield your attention from distraction and your senses from overstimulation. Now, I’m not a biologist, but from what I’ve come to understand, this is a cue for the serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitters to kick in as there is no immediate need for the fight-or-flight response. Being alone allows your brain to process and unravel problems, that’s why shutting off and being alone in our heads is a natural part of our biology through sleep! [Psychology Today]

“The main difference between play and playfulness is that play is an activity, while playfulness is an attitude.” [Miguel Sicart]

If you find yourself in a deeper rut and you can’t even get yourself to that place to play, here are some things that might help you tame the Resistance [The War of Art] and get started.

Dedicate a space and time

The absence of the space negates the importance of the act, which won’t help trigger the attitude. Choose a specific space, no matter how small or big, and place a table and a chair, with tools, paints, canvases, fabrics, machines, anything and everything you’ve collected or think you might use. Then give yourself time. Schedule it in your calendar, with a start and end time (if you’re like me and feel guilty when you’re not ‘working’ on something).

Set some rules

In her presentation, Play by your own rules, Jessica Walsh mentions how hard it is to work for clients who don’t have any limitations. So much so, that she would create her own constraints because it helped guide her creativity. Rules are a blessing in disguise! Set 2–3 rules before you begin something, and adjust as you go.

Use Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)

In her amazing book, The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about setting up rituals of preparation. These are rituals that trigger a signal to your brain that hey, something familiar is about to happen. For example, when you sit at your desk to work, taking off your watch, tying up your hair, lighting up a candle, turning on your favourite playlist, or pouring yourself a fresh cup of coffee like my brother does. “You may now descend” he said once, speaking to the imaginary muse (as I pretended to not hear him).

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield wrote that Somerset Maugham was asked if he wrote on a schedule or when he felt inspired. To which he replied, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” And that works for Maughan because, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” [Donald Hebb] This signal is optimistic and gets you ready for context. It’s a sign of beginning battle, and a sort of a call for the muse.

Keep it small and consistent

Many (and I mean many) well known thinkers/philosophers or even preachers have confidently reached this conclusion. Find the smallest positive action that resonates the most with you and reinforce it. Daily. The point of aiming small should be obvious in that it will make it a lot easier to commit to. You shouldn’t care about reaching the same goal by doing a lot of positive action all in one week, then again after 2 months. You’re looking for the consistency of positive reinforcement.

“Small positive actions every day will add up to large changes over time, as you gradually build new neural structures” [Buddha’s Brain]

The good ol’ — Gain some headspace

Being in a state of play requires you to be relaxed and chill; not having a deadline on your tail, and discarding yourself of any sense of anxiousness. It doesn’t have to be in the form of sitting on your bum with a lit candle chanting mantras. Adult colouring books, puzzles, showers, or even a walk could help you clear your mind. Tune into a calm, grounded wavelength for some clarity and focus.

Gaining some headspace should get you ready for the the optimal playing experience, and aid you to play while having, what psychologists call, ‘cognitive flow’. You’re looking for something that challenges you, but doesn’t drive you up the wall at the same time.

Final thought

While writing this post I remembered a scene that stuck with me from an old series called Al-Taghriba. In one of the episodes, we see one of the characters struggling with the realities of maturity and growth. His older brother finds him retrieved into the hills one day and tries to put him at ease saying,

“It’s a very difficult and complicated process when we begin our transformation from childhood into adulthood. Growth is rebirth. Birth in itself is a very difficult thing, and it carries with it its own pains. The difference however, is that in growth, oneself performs its own rebirth. Something within us must die first, to make room for the rebirth of something new.” [Rushdi to Salah, Episode 28]

With this in mind, reflect on finding what you’re hanging on to that’s stopping you from healing over this phase. What’s keeping you from going back out into the world and it’s troubles with playful creativity. Let it go. Let it die. You’re making room for something new. Because as we say here at Shopify, if it’s uncomfortable, it’s growth.