A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Here is Part I of an article I wrote for an online magazine some years back, reposted and updated from my old blog. Part I of a series.

Now, I don’t expect my advice to suit everyone. I just read the advice of a writer over at the online Locus magazine about managing your time, and I didn’t agree with three words of it together.

For example, the writer at Locus advised against turning off the internet while working. He’s an online writer, so his dependence on the internet makes sense: I don’t have the same concern. At the same time he advised not doing research on the internet, which can lead to excessive websurfing. Instead, he just leaves a note in his manuscript to come back and add necessary data, or to get an editor to do it. For example, the exact length of the Brooklyn Bridge just gets a placeholder while he writes.

That may work for writers, but as an artist, I actually have to draw the Brooklyn Bridge. I can’t just leave the panel blank and turn in my pages with blank panels for everything I can’t draw at the moment so an editor can pop in the details later. I certainly can’t leave the hard parts of the drawing job all for the end of the assignment. So for me, turning off the internet, or setting a time limit is essential for my self control.

Like I said, each to their own. My methods seem draconian to some. If they work for you, great. If not, I’m sure we’d all welcome your sugggestions.

Time Management Skills

I am not going to be writing a column about the State of the Industry, or which comic character is cooler, or which trend is going to save the market or anything like that because I honestly don’t pay a great deal of attention to the day-to-day workings of the comic book industry. I am entirely too centered on my own business.

That business is being a professional creator. That is what concerns me. That is the only thing I really know much about. So, that is what I will be contributing here: information and advice about how to survive and thrive as a professional.

So. Let’s talk about time management.

If there is one thing that creators know how to do, it’s waste time. We’re masters of procrastination. Freelancers working at home can imagine a thousand ways to sink minutes and hours and not accomplish much of anything and still make it to the end of the day feeling like they’ve done their bit of work. It’s easy to delude ourselves since we usually live and work at home alone and there is no boss standing over us cracking the whip.

We have friends and family who drop in any old time because we don’t have real jobs and they want to free us from the drudge of our drawing boards. That is very nice of them, but many creators don’t have the willpower to just say no to distractions. A coffee break becomes two or three hours out of the day and the next thing you know, you’ve lost eight or ten hours of work in a week just hanging out with your buddies a few times. Do that for a month, and you’ve lost a week’s work, easily.

The procrastination monster is the bane of every freelancer’s existence. Once upon a time, we wrote and drew comics for free. One day we woke up, and comics became a job. Suddenly, it wasn’t as much fun anymore. There’s nothing like the pressure of a production schedule, income concerns and the opinion of the public to take the wind out of your sails and dock the flight of your imagination for good. Writer’s Block is nothing but a creator’s special brand of procrastination. Ideas and images don’t come when they are blocked by money and deadline worries. It’s easy to create when you have nothing to think about but creating. It’s not so easy to create when you can’t pay the rent and put food on the table or get your children medical care. (There’s the “art is pain” school of thought where living in a garret seems to be the ideal and suffering for your art makes for great poetry, but when one’s goal is simply to live another day so one can write another poem, I don’t imagine getting braces for children’s teeth is likely to be much of a concern.)

Then there are the day-to-day distractions of paperwork and the ringing phone and the office clutter in which hours of time get wasted when this paper gets misfiled or that bill gets lost. Lose only one hour of time per day to disorganization (and that is a conservative, average estimate most time management gurus agree on) and you’ve lost 365 hours of work per year. That’s nine weeks of work time down the tubes; two full months! Multiply that lost time by your hourly income, and you really see how time is money.

How many pages could you have drawn in nine weeks? How many paintings could you have completed? How many stories could you have written? How much income did that disorganization cost you?

Time is your money and time is your life. If you want to piss it away playing video games when you ought to be drawing, and hanging out with your buddies when you ought to be writing, go ahead. It’s your life.

But if you want to make the most of that time as a professional, then you’ve got to start taking a serious look at how you manage your time resource.

Aspiring professionals are true masters of self-delusion about their time management. They arrive at conventions with scant portfolios, telling editors and art directors how little time they had to create new works to show. If one is having that much trouble coming up with the time to create pages and paintings when one is an amateur, how the heck does one expect to find the time to do the work as a professional?

You’ve got time to go to the movies. You’ve got time to watch television. You’ve got time to go to a convention. Then, you’ve got time to get some work done.

Here are some time management tips for pros and aspiring pros:

NUMBER ONE:

Don’t be on time, be early:

On time is NEVER good enough. On time almost always means that you will be late. Schedule every project as if you have days and, if possible, weeks less time than you actually have. Create a sense of urgency about the project. You never know what distractions will arise or how much time a page of art takes to draw. It’s not something you can block out into eight hours or ten hours. Every page is different. You could have a family emergency or financial crises that will distract you. Pages could get lost. The cat could drop a hairball on your script. You never know. Last month I was bitten by a brown recluse spider on my drawing arm. There was no way to prepare for that!

So, I work several days a week for extra long hours, often 14 hours a day. Then I work several days a week at a lighter pace: about eight hours. (That’s actual drawing time, not time spent on the phone or shuffling papers.) A few days a week at extra hours helps me to get a little bit ahead each week. If I have managed to botch something and get behind, it helps me to catch back up. I don’t recommend working every day at all out speed. You will burn out. Set up a simple reward system for goals that you have met, like a movie or an afternoon with friends. Record your progress on a calendar. Have a minimum daily goal you would like to meet and then strive to exceed it at least a couple of days a week. Do that for a few months, and you will find that you may have been able to get as much as one issue ahead of schedule.

c

Hoo boy, I need to re-read this one every few months. I went for years working this kind of schedule, but changed my habits when I moved to the farm. Now I have to acclimate myself to these long hours again. Fortunately, I have few outside distractions, a nice home, great family, wonderful support from friends, and a very comfortable studio in which to work. No complaints, and no need to slack.