“Just Working”: On Career Extracurriculars (and other excuses)
So, about that blog I was doing…
When I made my big, public declaration of tracking updates and trials and explorations on my site last year, I really did mean to do it. It was the new year, I was on the hunt for a new job, and so eager for an outlet for all the things I did and thought about in between the applications. I made it a whole two entries in!
And then, in January 2025, I left the country for 2 weeks for a lovely vacation (where I “wouldn’t have to worry about all that LinkedIn-ese for a while”), and very unexpectedly came back home to a job offer and a starting date of the very next day, jetlag and all.
Clearly, things kind of fizzled out after that.
Month by month, as I worked and learned, the whole blog thing quietly tumbled down the list of priorities. Hopefully most people didn’t notice, since there wasn’t a long-standing-posting-schedule precedent to speak of. But, in the name of holding myself accountable, I did put the damn thing on my homepage. And the further the calendar date grew from the previous entry, the larger the elephant in the room felt.
I could have probably just quietly hidden the whole section of the site away - and I did definitely want to - but instead I wanted to do the more embarrassing thing of acknowledging it. Much like one (me) (very often) finds a forgotten-about Tupperware container of last month’s leftovers, you can either throw the whole container away, or blast the thing with scalding water until the reminders of one’s (my) negligence is scrubbed clean, along with my conscience.
The thing is, the blog didn’t disappear because nothing was happening. It’s very much the opposite: the past year was full of work, learning, and adjustment. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t the kind of work that easily turns into tidy updates or portfolio pieces.
Which led me to a slightly uncomfortable question that I kept circling back to.
Photo by Freepik
Did “just working” stop being enough?
Those who know me personally know that I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the Facebook-ification of LinkedIn. Both sites had a similar one-sentence premise to me when they first started: a way to catch up with people you knew. But now things feel a lot less about the “who” and more about the “what”; people are sharing impressive projects, collaborations, and podcast-worthy musings at a dizzying rate. I sometimes find myself wondering whether simply “just working” comes across as substandard, uninspired, or unambitious. And at the risk of sounding a little jaded, I find that it’s extra relevant for people working in the various avenues of design.
I’m not too proud to admit I am jealous of the careers where you “just” submit a resumé, and not an extra body of work to support it. When an accountant works at a small firm, do they do a “what if” practice run on the year-over-year growth spreadsheets for Microsoft for their resumé, to prove that they can?
I want to know, actually! I know nothing of the field!
A rough thing about being a working designer is that some projects or brands don’t always quite make the portfolio cut, despite your best efforts and intentions. Sometimes it’s a mismatch of ambition and budgeting/time, target audience, client tastes, confidentiality, or some combination thereof. I see other designers make up for this every day in their free time, putting out impressive personal projects that stretch their limits.
My reality is, I spent the last year acclimating to a new team, in a new organization, in a new context: designing (and marketeering, because no job in design stays 100% true to what it is on paper) in-house! I found myself in a Big Corporate Setting with its own events, signage, stakeholders, newsletters (which were, at the time, feeling a little neglected), catered lunch signups, merchandise, and more. There was a long-overdue rebranding to finish and roll out, international offices and external parties to meet and provide for, an intern-turned-junior to nurture and train, and colleagues - more of them than ever - who all had their own to-do’s that very rarely aligned with mine.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of the people doing that work; if anything, I’m impressed by the stamina. It’s more that seeing it everywhere makes me wonder where the baseline actually is. Is the expectation to do good work at your job, or to also be building a visible body of work around it at all times? I’m still not sure I know the answer.
So, my possible sin is that I didn’t do any of that creativity-stretching work last year. I would do my work to the best of my ability, and then go home. And my website and LinkedIn page became a container of moldy leftover pasta.
And now, instead of quietly throwing the whole thing away, I’m doing the hard and awkward thing: blasting it with the metaphorical boiling water and dealing with the mess. I might not have a neat stack of portfolio-ready case studies or late-night passion projects to show for the past year, but it did produce a lot of learning, a lot of context, and a lot of stories that probably deserve to exist somewhere outside my own head. If nothing else, this blog can be that place, a slightly less moldy container for the things that happen in between the neatly packaged highlights.
No promises about a strict posting schedule, that kind of ambition is what got me into this situation in the first place. But nevertheless, I hope to start again!
