Making Things Is…

Making things is hard.

It’s 19:35 (7:35pm) and I’m writing this from my living room couch in Berlin after a long day of home office work, five weeks into the COVID19 quarantine.

And I just thought of something I should be doing instead of writing this.

Still, I’m going to write for a little bit longer because I only have fifteen minutes before my wife is done with her work and we get to have dinner together.

Making things is hard. I feel like I could write about this every day for a year and still come up with a new reason why it’s hard on the 366th day. Maybe I will. Great. I just came up with a new „Project“. Because I need a new project. Because I’m already having a hard time doing all my other projects. Because all of my projects are things for me to make and, as previously mentioned, making things is hard.

Making things is hard because making things takes time.

Sometimes a lot of time. Other times though, it doesn’t take that long - but only because you’ve already spent so much time working on it, practicing it and learning about it. See that? That’s hidden time. Time that feels like it doesn’t count in figuring out how long it took you to do something - but time that was crucial in getting you there. Queue up the parable of the Japanese artist drawing a perfect circle for the emperor.

So maybe I’m writing this, writing “making things is hard”, as an attempt to get a hold of that time and look at it. I want to pay more attention to my time. To see where it goes and how I spend it and see just how much of my time is spent making things - and whether my time is well-spent and whether the things I’ve made were worth that time.

Stay tuned. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.