Battling Burnout: The Side Project Ritual

[Music] hi i'm lara lynn and this is the side project ritual so i'm not going to do a lot of bio because i have a lot to go over during the talk but i'll just say uh briefly that i've worked in games for about 26 years now across a whole bunch of different platforms uh game styles audiences for a lot of different companies and uh over the years i've almost always had a side project going in fact most of my friends kind of consider my side project to be my ever present companion as i go through game development and that's largely what i'm going to be talking about today what i've learned about that process and how it's helped me stay in the industry for as many years as i have i've also spoken quite a bit at conferences and initially it was about design topics but recently i found myself at a niche between uh wellness

and game development and so this talk today is also squarely in between those two subjects so a little bit of an overview about what i'm going to be talking about to help us stay oriented i'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about burnout in its toll not a lot of time but a little bit just to make sure we're operating from the same assumptions about burnout then i'm going to be talking about the power of ritual and other mental tools that you can use to succeed and then i'll actually be giving you the eight steps in the side project ritual so let's get started by talking about burnout so everyone's familiar with the topic of burnout if you work in game development at any time for any time length at all you've probably encountered it if not in yourself than in others the world health organization actually considers it a disorder or syndrome and they describe it as being a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed

i'm not a big fan of that passive language i would almost call it passive aggressive language there because it implies that the person on the receiving end of burnout has to be the one to manage it i don't necessarily think that's the case uh but i do agree with the dimensions i'm going to mention a couple more but the dimensions that they say here that it's really characterized by a feeling of exhaustion and negative feeling negative or cynical about your job and then reduced efficiency and effectiveness at your job we actually live in a time and work in an industry with inevitable stress so i mean i don't know what possibly could be happening right now in the world that would cause any of us to have any stress but on top of that our industry is its own source of stress uh it's a creative work environment and what that means is that people are always critiquing your work and you're always putting yourself and your skills and your talent and what you believe out there for other people to critique

and that inherently creates stress where it's also an industry of constant change so whether it's moving on to a new game whether it's new people on the team people leaving the team we're always even when we make sequels we're always having to create new features and new elements that have never been seen before in games it's just the constant flood of change can be overwhelming there's also a lot of loss and grief we don't really discuss um even shipping a game that you're proud of has a certain amount of loss and grief associated with it because you spent a lot of time with that game and having it suddenly out of your life can be something that's hard to deal with but even more so uh having games canceled and companies close and people leave the team or the industry all together it's definitely cycles of loss and grief in a in you know mixed in between the joy and creation

and then most important i think in terms of adding stress it's we have a silence endurance culture and what i mean by that is you're expected to endure you're expected to um find ways to cope by yourself and you're expected not to complain about it and not to try to make changes and in fact trying to make changes it's often seen as complaining it's seen as a lack of passion it's seen as you just not being strong enough for this industry and that is unfortunate because what that means is we don't fix the problems that are causing people to feel so much stress so the stress that creates burnout and burnout itself often go unrecognized so here's are some of the ways that you can recognize it in yourself and in others there's what everybody looks for which is that intense anger i can't take this anymore but there are also other signs like the thousand mile pain stare that you see from someone who's been crunching for six months now there's a frustration

and an inability to focus and the two really uh are a self-feeding cycle between those two factors and there are feelings of worthless and accompanies and i want to make sure to separate this out from imposter syndrome imposter syndrome is when you feel like you're not good at something you're actually good at a specific task or uh activity or thing that you're actually good at this is feeling worthless and incompetent at everything you feel like you're not you just are not worth anything as a person not just about the task it causes us to disconnect from friends and family and things that we enjoy and it also causes physical illness heart illness heart disease and um uh stress itself can just cause a variety of effects including autoimmune disorders um on your body and that's not to mention of

course uh heartburn and ulcer so there are a ton of ways to recognize when burnout is happening but usually we discover it way too late we figure it out at the point where you or the person involved just wants to leave the team or leave the company or maybe even leave the whole industry and this comes at a really high cost in a deloitte survey 91 of the people they surveyed this is just about people in general uh not about game development ninety-one percent said that they have an unman unmanageable amount of stress when they do it negatively impacts the quality of their work eighty-three percent said burnout from work negatively impacts their personal relationships and here's the important point eighty-seven percent say they're passionate about their current job but sixty-four percent say they're still frequently stressed passion does not exclude or make impossible

getting burned out and getting stressed so that is a fiction in game development that if you're passionate about it you'll never burn out and in fact engagement development there's also a very high cost so game development as a career as a way to make a living has been around for at least 30 years i know because when i started people had already been in it for five or ten years and yet when you look at the stats there's this huge cliff where 82 of game developers have been in the industry less than 15 years it's the 15-year cliff which means of course the flip side only 16 of game developers have been in the industry for 15 or more years so that um includes me i'm in that category and i've actually watched a lot of the people that i knew and were friends with who had as many years as i have get frustrated and burned out and leave so what can we do to start to take control over this and to really battle burnout there's some standard things that are always suggested when this topic comes up mindfulness which you'll see as a part

of my presentation as well they always recommend of course that you take your breaks and schedule your vacations and use up your pto every year although in most jobs it's really difficult to do that in many game jobs because you're always a critical person and often told that you can't take your vacation this year you need to save it for next year take advantage of mental health resources take this as a great organization i encourage you to uh to check it out and avail yourself of their resources cultural change lots of movements about changing our culture to be less abrasive and to be less demanding in terms of crunch and in terms of expected ordinary overtime so those are all good ways to see the signs and interrupt the process and try to improve overall our industry so that there's less burnout but what would really be better is to avoid that in the first place and to

focus on the kind of growth and resilience that helps us not get burned out and i'm not saying that companies don't need to improve because they definitely do but you as a person also can become more resilient the process though of becoming resilient requires an intent to do that and requires a sense of purpose and it also requires some plans and consistency it's not something that happens by accident but when you can manage to do that you can really heal so this is a plan the side project ritual is eight science back steps and i'll use the power of ritual for mental and emotional reset so when i say that uh i'm going to recommend you recover from the burnout of game development with more game development i anticipate the reaction is probably going to be really um you know and i understand why uh this guy and you might be skeptical so let's just get into it i'll talk

about why i think this is valuable and why you shouldn't be skeptical about it the side project ritual is a purpose-driven plan to battle burnout and it does use the power of ritual and when i say the power of ritual a lot of people get this image in their head and i understand that it has certain connotations but i do want to make the point that up front that that's not the case here if you're into crystals and incense cool good for you you can totally use that but ritual does not have to be about those sorts of things it doesn't have to be tied to any religion or even any spirituality in fact this is going to be very pragmatic and very practical and it includes a lot of scientific data and studies and tips so don't go into this expecting that it's going to be kind of a new religion or anything like that it's really a set of mental tools and tricks we're going to use cognitive science and reboot and build resilience in your brain

so what do i mean when i say ritual this is my definition of ritual for the purpose of this talk a ritual involves words signs and actions that take you away from the mundane crafting an intentional space for creative work and free thought some of the mental techniques involved around ritual can vary depending on what the ritual is but there's a reason that it's so successful in human culture across the world almost every human society has elements of ritual embedded in various aspects of their life and they all have certain things in common one of them is visualization where your picture picturing an outcome of the work that you're doing studies have shown that thoughts produce the same mental instructions and effects as actions do and in fact visualization visualizing success visualizing things being better visualizing completing something is actually can actually enhance

motivation increase confidence and increase your efficiency it improves your motor performance it can increase the flow state visualization is actually a profound way to improve your success and some studies for example showed that basketball players this is the classic study basketball players were split into two groups one group practiced free throws and the other group visualized making free throws and didn't practice at all and when they actually played the next day those who visualized saw a slightly greater performance increase over those that practiced it's that effective superstition is another element of ritual and most people have a negative connotation to superstition but i'd like to invite you to change your mind about that an example of superstition is there was a an experiment actually two experiments around golf in one experiment people before they uh

made a shot in golf were told that they had a lucky ball or that they had an ordinary ball in the other experiment uh before someone took their shot either the moderator said nothing or said i'm crossing my fingers for you in both cases involving luck performance increased and in fact we as human beings and all animals really are wired for superstition the uh probably most famous behavioral researcher uh bf skinner started researching pigeons and he set up something to feed the birds at regular intervals and what happened was it's not the birds didn't develop a sense of time and all cluster around the feeding mechanism at a certain time what happened was they started acting in a particular way and started believing that the way they were acting influenced the arrival of food so by the end of the study three quarters of the pigeons became superstitious

and for example one pigeon uh believed that turning around in it in a circle two or three times was what brought the food and most interestingly it wasn't turning in any direction it was always counterclockwise that he would counter clock turn counterclockwise two or three times and then the food would come so if birds can become superstitious without any prompting from us any really teaching that behavior that tells you how effective it is and how well it works in fact many successful creators have used lucky rituals for example mary shelley had a book constrictor around her neck while she wrote and she would interpret how the book instructor was acting and moving um to determine whether she was done writing for the day charles dickens actually had a compass with him that he carried all the time and he always slept with it with him and facing north so there's tremendous use of superstition as a tool as a mental tool and we want to use it to leverage uh those internal mechanisms to build

self-confidence and self-esteem and then finally creative therapy actually works too creative exercises have been shown to reduce pain anxiety and depression and stress while increasing self-esteem and improving the quality of life creativity itself um has that effect it doesn't matter how good you are at it or what you produce at the end of it it's the act of creativity that has the therapeutic effects and so i say all of these things knowing that inherently most people in game development are skeptics of science when it comes to things like this we're absolutely believers in science and everything else but we tend to dismiss things like superstition and visualization and even ritual itself because it's sometimes easier to dismiss those than to see them as tools and so i understand that sense i understand that sentiment but somehow ritual and visualization and

superstition and creativity and game dev just don't belong in the same in the same you know process together but i can tell you they do and i can tell you the game development is the answer for burnout and game development and that's not just because it's the hair of the dog that bit you so here are some reasons that you can use a solo game project to battle your burnout first is that one thing that causes a lot of workplace stress and game development is that you are constantly in for most people under deadline under stress trying to get things done trying to make sure those things coordinate with what the rest of the team is doing and you have somebody who's telling you what to create and and that's true for almost everybody even if you're an executive at a game company i can save from experience there's i still had a boss who was telling me what to do so in my side projects though no one could tell me what to do and that was when i especially was under stress

during a project at any given time or if i felt like i didn't agree with the decisions that were being made it was tremendously helpful for me to come home and work on something where no one could tell me what to do it also means you can focus on variety make something new and exciting learn new skills do things you haven't done before it gives you tremendous freedom to express yourself most of us don't get to actually express uh everything in who we are as a part of the games that we're making usually because we're making those in collaboration with other people but it also lets you express yourself um in other ways it doesn't mean every game you make has to be you know a message game with a capital m it can let you express yourself in terms of making that game you've always thought sounded fun but maybe three other people besides you would want to play that's expressing yourself too but the bottom line and the thing that i found ultimately most helpful about having a game dev side project is i can make whatever the hell i want

and nobody could tell me any differently and that freedom of just being my own boss um really made a difference to me so here's how all of these puzzle pieces fit together into the side project ritual it is eight steps and we're going to start with step one which is the opening so the opening of any ritual has a purpose every step has a purpose but the opening is particularly important it triggers our superstitions and it tells your brain that you're switching modes that this thing that's about to come up you understand what it is and you know what you're going to be doing and that it's important so before you start envisioning wind chimes and whale song it's about what's important to you so you want to collect inspirational items images music practices because again you're triggering your brain that you're getting ready to do the work you definitely want to give some thought

to superstition and luck if you don't have things that you will consider lucky now start to try to build those superstitions think about you know if i have um green tea while i'm working it's going to help me work faster it's going to help me work better try to build those links for yourself and again so you don't think it has to be a whale song let's look at an example dad dad oh what's important and wait count to 20. no dad you listen two three four in greek anna theo [Music] tessita dente

[Music] so did you catch it henry jones jr has a focusing phrase that he would use in his opening when he gets distracted may he who illuminated this illuminate me and that's a good example of the kind of thing that you would use as a focus during your opening a couple other examples i'll refer to stephen pressfield in his book the war of art a little bit later again in this presentation it's awesome book though and he opens it or has in it what he does every day as a part of his work he says i put on my lucky work boots and stitch them up with the lucky laces that my niece meredith gave me i head back to my office crank up the computer my lucky hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair with the lucky charm i got in st marie de la mare for only eight bucks with my lucky largo name tag that came

from a dream i once had i put it on on my thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my bob my friend bob for sandy gave me i point it toward my chair so it can fire inspiration into me i say my prayer which is the invocation of the muse from homer's odyssey and it sits next to my shelf with the cufflinks that belong to my father and my lucky acorn from the battlefield at thermopylae it's about 10 30 now i sit down and plunge in and similarly from stephen king i have a glass of water or a cup of tea there's a certain time i sit down from 8 to 8 30 somewhere within a half hour every morning i have my vitamin pill and my music i sit in the same seat and the papers are all arranged in the same places the cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind you're going to be dreaming soon and that's really what the opening

does it sets a space in your mind it creates that space it frames your work and it gives it purpose but you need to figure out what matters to you you need to choose something that reflects you as a unique person it can be things that inspired you in the past or something that's inspiring you to create a new future so some examples if i were going to create if i were my side project was an action game or a stealth game or had a certain um tone to it i might choose for my opening focus this quote from thief wisdom and balance lie and knowing your own nature over time if during the pro if i wanted to be instead inspired while working on my side project from the fact that i've survived an immense amount of time with incurable lung cancer i might quote i feel fantastic and i'm still alive from the ending theme song to portal and have a screenshot from portal 2 along with it

but my focus right now is actually built upon the fact that i'm making an interactive narrative game it's a paranormal romance for choice of games and their new hearts choice label so because it's writing this is my opening focus i've been to another world and come back listen to me that's from mark helpfriend's winter's tale which is a book that always inspired me to write better than i do and i chose that focus intentionally because i feel like as the writer and creator of this game i am seeing and experiencing this different world and now i have to come back and relay it to people playing the game in a way that makes them feel like feel like they're experiencing it too so that's my opening focus but whatever you come up with it should be and will be as unique as you are so step two in the side ritual is the

sacred space and time now when i say sacred i don't mean religious i mean for example sacrosanct or regarded with great respect and reverence so when you set up your space you want to have a dedicated space so you're in the same spot every day if you can be and it can be really small it can be the corner of the kitchen you just want to have room to display some objects that are inspirational to you and they don't have to be again religious or mystical they can be whatever has meaning to you you do need to be left alone though so noise cancelling headphones can help when you're in a shared space but also just letting the people that you share your home with know that when at a certain uh time of day or night you need to be left alone for this for a certain period of time like an hour or two hours uh because that's your focus time you'll also want to gather your tools together into this space most people of course think of hardware

and software because we're talking about game development but it can also be also be things like timers if you are a big fan of the things like the pomodoro technique it can be timers to to plan uh different work sessions it can include music themed for whatever it is that you're working on but it can also include things like scent or light so it could be um a candle that smells like evergreens if you're working on something that takes place in a forest or light that imitates sunlight to help you feel better during that time or dim lighting that makes you feel like it's an escape from the rest of your day whatever works for you and the time is sacred too so you want to decide how much time you're going to spend and then you're going to commit to that time and committing means you're going to block out distractions you're not going to get spend that time surfing the web answering emails you're not going to do things that are unrelated to what you're working on and you're also going to persist even when it's frustrating and what i mean by that is you're going

to use that time for something creative even if it means switching tasks so if you are working on your game and you're working on code and you feel completely stuck and you just can't do it today switch to drawing switch to making music switch to working on audio it can even be not related to the project if you have to like adult coloring books things like that just do something creative for that space of time and always remind yourself that this is your time it's it's not an obligation it's a gift that you're making to yourself and over time as you do the ritual more and more you'll start to look forward to it and actually really jealously guard your ritual time so step three is mindfulness now everybody thinks of meditation first when you mention mindfulness and yes meditation is good a couple different things that you can try because we're only going to meditate for two to three minutes it's a very short session you can do three minutes of breathing where you spend those three minutes being aware

of each breath you take you try to breathe in a certain rhythm and you try to be aware of how the breath feels going in and out of your body there's something else called visualize the river and this is what i used when i was trying to cope with cancer diagnosis so i would envision myself laying on my back floating in a river and for about 30 seconds i'll just float in the river and really you know even play sound effects and really immerse myself in that sense of floating in the river and then whatever it is that is distracting me or bothering me i'll picture myself actually bundling it up in my head reaching into my head and taking it out and i feel it in my hand for a second and then i set it in the river beside me and now i watch it float along with me and after about a minute of that i make the decision to let it go it's going to be floating in the river with

me when the time comes it will still be there i just don't need to carry it along with me right now you can also repeat a mantra and it doesn't have to be home or anything like official it can be things like i'm here i'm present or my favorite mantra from a guided meditation that i used to love in this moment everything is okay but mindfulness doesn't have to be meditation there are other ways that you can be mindful so attentive listening is one way and that is finding a sound that you find interesting or intriguing like a sound of a forest and spending three minutes actually paying attention to it really listening to it trying to pick apart all of the different sounds in it and how often do you hear them and what do you think they mean then there is the raisin exercise which is as fun as it sounds you take a small piece of food

and you act like you're from another planet and you've never seen it before and you spend the three minutes just looking at it and marveling at it and feeling the texture of it and smelling it and tasting a little bit of it really paying attention to that thing as if you've never seen it before and then mindful seeing so mindful seeing is similar to attentive listening it's just visual instead so you take you know you can look out your own window or for example on netflix there are videos of for example a train going through sweden for an hour so you can take those videos and just spend three minutes watching it carefully and just being very mindful about everything that you're seeing happening every dust moat the wind moving leaves of grass right very specifically looking at that carefully and there are also sound effects and other gadgets that you can use to help you focus during these sessions like singing bowls

[Music] bonsai taking three to four to five minutes and trimming and uh really lovingly caring for a bonsai tree is one of the most meditative things that you can do there are various applications that can help you uh it's bootify over there on the left bootify is super great with short session um especially for short session meditations that happen while you're doing something else like walking to work or taking a break at work or about to go to sleep i use headspace myself and very much like it but i've also heard really good things about calm and there are actually gadgets that help with meditation specifically with coherence most of them i haven't used the muse but i've used the technology in unite which that company used to be called wild divine and i've also used heart math that's what i have right now

so coherence is when your breathing and heart rate are incoherence they're aligned and in that state that's the state that naturally occurs with meditation and in that state you have enhanced senses and enhanced sense of well-being as well and so what the gadgets can do is they can help you understand the feeling of when you're in that state so you can achieve that state without the gadgets as well then after the mindfulness you're going to spend a few minutes on your focused goals you're going to review the work you did in the last session for about five minutes and make note of any revisions you have but that's getting your head back in the space of what you were working on and taking dedicated time to do that means you're not spending your actual work time trying getting a little bit of the ways down the road and then saying wait what was i doing again so you're going to take the time to review and get that all in your head first and then you're going to look at the focus goals that you had at the end of

your last session so since those are created at the end of the last session i'm going to talk about those a little bit later and then it's time to do the work and i use the phrase do the work intentionally because that's the phrase that stephen pressfield uses in the war of art he also talks about something called resistance resistance is the invisible force that stops you from doing your work and i think we've all experienced it in one thing form or another and he always says it's the if it's the thing that stops you from actually working out because working out is good for you something that stops you from eating the healthy stuff instead of the unhealthy stuff because the healthy stuff is good for you so he says there's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't and the secret is this it's not the writing part that's hard what's hard is sitting down to write what keeps us from sitting down is resistance and he goes on to say

most of us have two lives the life we live and the unlived life within us between the two stands resistance resistance cannot be seen touched heard or smelled but it can be felt we all experience it as an energy field radiating from a work in potential it's a repelling force it's negative its aim is to shove us away distract us to prevent us from doing our work and i say all of that because you need to focus on doing the work and you need to end resistance and understand when it's happening so of course first you'll need to choose project whatever you choose it doesn't have to be your final answer it just needs to be something that you plan to ship it can be really small but you need to plan to ship it the act of knowing you're going to complete something changes the tone of your work and i think that's an important part of this process is belief that you're going to ship it when you're done

then of course you need to choose your weapon as well which is you know kind of for game development hand in hand with the project that you want to undertake so it can be physical games if you want to get away from working in the digital which you do all day there's some great narrative game tools out there this is actually a screenshot from my narrative game which i'm building in choice script for choice of games but there are things like twine and inform that are great too there's some really simple game tools that focus just on the active creation and not on the tool itself things like game maker rpg maker and pico 8 and of course unity and unreal are always available so a little bit of a practical note a lot of people in game development work under ip agreements and or restrictions from moonlighting or commercial side projects those suck and are often uh and i'm not saying this is not legal advice but they're often unenforceable anyway but even if they're unenforceable it's got a chilling effect because no one

wants to be the person that sounds like you're distracted from your main game that you're working on for work by this side game i know personally i was never distracted by my study project but it still i felt odd even bringing it up when i had permission when i had to get permission for a side project so if you're in that situation and i'm not saying to be a secret squirrel and work on it secretly it's a terrible idea what i am saying is you can do things like game mods uh game mods are uh things that avoid the ip issues because they're always owned by the company that released the original game so things like skyrim or fallout for example have creator kits and so do other games you can participate in game jams that starts with your spark and then you can really finish that small project and release it for free as a part of the game jam or if you feel completely blocked by your ip agreements there are always things like woodworking and paper craft and knitting and often some of those can become games

can become releasable games it's interesting to think about you know physical games from glass making for example but it's just another way to express yourself you want to think about your key skills and make sure whatever you're working on you have at least one key skill that's going to contribute to it you don't want to try something that's all new for you because you'll you'll feel like you're constantly failing but you do want a little bit of new a little bit of something you don't do in your day job because you want this to feel like an opportunity to do something different ultimately of course you'll find yourself staring at this the blank page blank page is my nemesis i'm actually terribly dealing with the blank page so one of the things that i've learned to do is in whatever form i'm documenting or writing down ideas for this game whether it's a physical notebook or google docs or whatever i make a page called scratch and on the scratch page i can type in any idea i have any thought i have any link i have anything that i think is useful and the fact that it's not intended to

be final it's just intended to be a space to collect things means i feel safe typing in there and a lot of times when i'm stuck on the blank page i'll go to my scratch page and just start typing stream of consciousness and over time i'll end up in a place where i feel like okay i can work now and also a lot of good ideas will come from it you also need to teach yourself to let go we work in an industry where it's important that all of us know what we're building and what's due now and how it all ladders up to the same goal and how it all works together and that can feel really inhibiting when you're working on a solo project i know personally it was one of the hardest things that i had to get over was feeling like um i can't i can't work because i don't know everything that i need to build but in this you don't have to plan for everything that's a part of the joy with the side project is that you actually can let go but you absolutely do need to commit even if that means you're going to whittle until you uncover the shape of your game you're going to

commit to spending that time something else that you should do as a part of doing the work is to find a way to talk about it you want a direct connection between people and your personal work and the reason that you want that is because it's going to keep you accountable and engaged and purposeful being under contract for my side project right now means i'm going to finish it because people are expecting it so you can stream your development on twitch or facebook for example but find a way to build some anticipation even if it's just with friends because that will keep you accountable so then we're going to have a moment of purposeful goals you're going to save your work super important obviously didn't want to not mention that and have that not be a part of the process we all do it routinely but certainly do it at the end of your session you're going to make your to-do's and what you're going to do in the process of making those to-do's

is you're going to add a context so this is something that i learned as a part of the getting things done approach to productivity a context means the place where you can actually do the thing in question and the reason i set different contexts is because i learned that there are different mental spaces where i can do different things like if it's complex code that i need to write i need to be at my desk 100 can't do it anywhere else if it's something i need to think through a problem i need to solve like how can you find out about this thing before this other thing has happened in this story a lot of times i can do that while i'm walking while i'm using an exercise bike i will find a time that is sort of action oriented um where i'm not trying to write or do anything else at the same time so i'll make a to-do walking task for that on my phone there are certain things i can do from a narrative perspective there's certain writing things i can do on my phone lots of things i can't but some i can so

the ones that can't be done on my phone i will make a note of that so when i'm waiting at the doctor's office or killing 15 minutes in bed before i try to fall asleep i will actually pull up my phone and start working on those and then we're going to have a moment of gratitude and this may seem like it's out of place but it's actually really important it's just one minute to press pause and reflect it's important to think of something that you're sincerely grateful for it doesn't have to be anything that happened in your session it could be anything in your day anything in your life and when you have that and you've thought about it for a minute you want to write it at the top of your notes section for your next session so the next time you start a session you're going to read that thing that you're grateful for again and here's why it's important gratitude has been shown in studies many studies actually to improve physical and psychological health your ability to sleep your self-esteem your mental strength it enhances your

empathy reduces your aggression it reduces stress it can be one of the best burnout busters around is having that moment of gratitude so it's a part of your daily ritual and then finally the closing so of course the closing is the book end to the opening that you had at the beginning of your ritual you're going to remind yourself of what you accomplished and clean and prep your sacred space so blow out any candles and have this sense of finishing and then you're going to have your ending focus you want to choose something that emphasizes why you just did the work that you did so for me again because this is primarily a writing task a writing driven game that i'm working on mine is also again from winter's tale mark halperin all great discoveries are products as much of doubt as of certainty and the two in opposition cleared the air for marvelous accidents so that those are the eight steps in the side project ritual and the beginning steps only take about

seven eight minutes the closing steps take about two three minutes maybe five if you have a lot of goals that you want to write down the bulk of it isn't doing the work but in having it in this ritual format you're doing all of the things that will trigger your brain to work in that space of time in a way that is creative and freeing and healing for yourself and this can actually become an evergreen process that gives you a sense of purpose and growth and again it's true that most of my friends are aware of my constant side projects the entire time i was in game development game development i honestly believe it's what helped keep me whole insane and over the course of doing this ritual over days and then months and then years you'll find that you're creating a series of guiding lights for yourself so you always have your way back to mental clarity and you always have a way to keep burnout at bay so that's the side project ritual

uh thanks for taking time to watch this today if you have any feedback or questions you can always find me on twitter at lara lynn and i've also got a website laurelmcwilliams.com that has contact information there as well so thank you