Hoo boy.
This article about ‘worshiping crunch’ popped up on Twitter on Wednesday and it’s making the rounds of many of the webcomic and freelance artists I follow. The reaction to the article is overwhelmingly, this is not only horseshit, it’s unhealthy.
The tl;dr to save you from the flashy prose of the article: Some creative people thrive on working eighty hours a day plus overtime, working on things due in four minutes, eating microwave ramen and Cheetos and drinking up all those 5-hour boost drinks in one go. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but it’s not that far from the truth. The article is an excerpt from the writer’s upcoming book about the cut-throat video game industry.
[EDIT: The writer has since come out stating that his excerpt has very much been taken out of context; he himself disdains the ‘crunch’ idea, which was lost in translation from the book to the online magazine.]
It really did get me thinking about my own work life, nonetheless.
I get it; some people thrive on the high-speed, high-maintenance atmosphere of certain industries, where most of your waking life (and probably most of your sleeping part of it as well) is spent ‘crunching’, getting a week or a month’s worth of regular-speed work into a short amount of time.
The last time I did the ‘crunch’ thing was at Yankee Candle, over ten years ago. Five years’ worth of working ‘mandatory overtime’ hours in the shipping department during fourth quarter. Q4 is of course holiday sales season, so our candle output shot up exponentially during that season. In 2002 it also included a few outside vendors who would buy in bulk. [Our team won the MVP award that year for Bravery In the Face of Insurmountable Odds and Success Despite Incredibly Unrealistic Sales Goals.]
Mind you, my hours were already pretty early: 6am to 2pm, five days a week. When it came to Q4, however, that ended up changing to 4am to 3pm, six days a week, Monday through Saturday. I didn’t complain, because a) I was getting pretty good pay, and the OT pay gave me a good padding in the bank for my bills, b) I got along with pretty much everyone in my department, so it wasn’t a completely hellish atmosphere, and c) I could still dedicate the early evening hours to my writing the trilogy.
Yes, even after ten hour days on the floor, I still went ahead and hit my 1000-word goal almost every night.
The downsides were plentiful as well. I was getting up at 2am and driving thirty miles through midwestern Massachusetts before any of the snow plows or sanding trucks were even out of the DPW barns. I had a half-pack a day smoking habit. I drank a huge cup of coffee (extra cream and sugar) in the morning and multiple giant bottles of Mountain Dew at work (and usually a can or two during my writing sessions), and ate a lot of really unhealthy convenience store food and snacks. I was lifting 30-40 pound boxes and lugging heavy pallets all day long.
Suffice it to say, every damn year I’d miss about a week’s worth of work close to Christmas, because I’d either get something like the flu brought on by exhaustion, or I’d tweak my sciatic nerve, or both. I always felt like shit at the end of the year.
By the end of 2004, I’d pretty much had enough. I was seeing A and driving down to New Jersey on a regular basis. I bailed in the spring of 2005 and moved down with her a week later.
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Anyway, about this ‘crunch’ thing.
I just can’t see myself dedicating that much of my life and health for an industry. Especially when I’m already fiercely dedicated to my writing career. Every job I’ve held since then, I’ve told managers that I’m fine with the forty hour workweek with the occasional OT if it’s absolutely necessary. But I have endeavors outside of work. I’m quite protective of my writing time, not to mention I do my best to come up for air and be social with friends and family. Thankfully, all my employers have accepted that without question.
Hell, I don’t even try to crunch a ridiculous amount of writing work into a single day. Sure, I give myself a busy creative schedule on purpose, but it’s a schedule I can handle and can adjust if and when necessary. It’s a daily schedule I enjoy and look forward to. I give myself reasonable writing deadlines. I might complain that I spend too much time futzing around on Twitter, but really…in the long run, it’s not as if I’m trying to write ten thousand words a day consistently. My count is more like five to seven hundred lately, and that’s just on the Lidwells project. Add these blogs and the 750 and it’s more like two thousand or so. And at the end of the day I’m happy with that, and not absolutely knackered afterwards.
I just can’t see myself risking health and sanity for it. Life is too short for that.
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