Building in the Margins

The dominant story about doing serious creative or intellectual work goes like this: clear the desk, clear the calendar, protect the morning, achieve deep focus, do the work. It is a beautiful story. It also happens to be false for almost everyone who has ever done meaningful work over a long period of time.

Real research happens in stolen half-hours. Real companies are sketched on commutes. Real books are written after the children are asleep. The clear desk and the protected morning are aspirations, not preconditions. Treating them as preconditions is one of the most efficient ways to never start.

Working in the margins forces a different kind of attention. You cannot afford to begin sessions by 'getting into it' — there is no getting into it. You learn to keep the question warm in the background so you can pick it up wherever you left off. You learn that an idea returned to many times beats an idea forced into one heroic session.

It also rearranges what counts as productivity. A paragraph written between meetings becomes a real paragraph. A sketch on the back of a receipt becomes a real sketch. Once the margins are taken seriously, the rest of the day stops feeling wasted.

I started a venture, a research project, and a portfolio of illustrations during years when I was working another job and raising small children. None of that work fits into a tidy productivity narrative. All of it survived because I stopped waiting for the right conditions and learned to recognise the conditions I actually had.

The talk draws on building Hey New Mama, on years of doctoral research, on growing a digital agency, and on the small daily decisions that allowed each of those to exist alongside the others.

It is useful for early-stage founders, researchers between institutions, parents returning to work, mid-career professionals carrying a side practice, and anyone who has been told — sometimes by themselves — that they do not have enough time for the work that actually matters to them.