Posts Tagged ‘Time Management’

18 items.

Get Organized

by Colleen Doran on July 20th, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Time Management

I am drawing like crazy and everyone is at San Diego, and my editors aren’t even looking at my files. I could be naked pole dancing on this blog and no one would notice. So, what the heck, I will upload an old post.

Originally written about three years ago in the middle of something of a nasty creative block (now over.)

I think I write half of these things as reminders to myself, because when I consider how much time I frittered away that could have been used to draw comics over the last year, I could scream. I usually have excellent work habits, but the last year or so…ugh. Just terrible. Too many disruptions, personal distractions, etc. I am having to relearn all my habits. It’s all good, though, because sometimes we just need to hit restart.

But I must say, moving out here to this bucolic land of wonder and peace and battling hummingbirds requires even more self discipline than city living ever did.

OK, now let’s get organized.

How much time do you lose each year due to disorganization?

Clutter? Misfiled papers? Missing bills? Piles of knickknacks?

The average person loses an entire hour EVERY SINGLE DAY just rummaging through things. What a time waster!

Worse yet, for the freelancer every bit of that time is MONEY, because we only get paid for what we actually produce! If we are losing an hour every day to clutter, we lose a real hour every single day of productivity! Over the course of one week, that’s an entire page of art or 52 pages of art EVERY SINGLE YEAR! Half a graphic novel! Three issues of a comics series!

HELLO!!!

Moreover, since most creative people are (in my experience) major clutterbugs, I’d bet that hour a day lost to clutter is a low estimate. Here’s a handy online calculator that will help you see just how much money your clutter is costing you.

I’ve just spent the last two weeks catching up on a backlog of commissions, filing, and organizing. Even though I am a pretty organized person, I cringe at the clutter that accumulated during the last six months of my deadline crunch when I wasn’t staying on top of the paperwork like I usually do, not to mention the piles of art that have simply never been organized in the first place.

Nothing compares to the mess an extremely intrusive person made of my belongings when they tried to help me move a few years ago. What was I thinking when I left them my house key to let in the cleaners?

While I was out of town, they decided to help do my packing for me! Wasn’t that nice?

However, their idea of packing was to simply throw things into boxes. They never labeled a single box of books or papers, and simply threw piles of my belongings into containers. And all of this without even asking me! I guess they wanted it to be a surprise. Well, it certainly was!

Some people are Almost Helpful.

Anyway…

Years ago, most of my work space was confined to a limited area of my home with just a few boxes of papers to clutter it up. When I was living in a 750 square foot condominium, it was comfortable to keep everything I needed in a small corner of my very small and modest home.

And then I began self publishing.

Sometimes I got a foot high stack of mail every single day. After a few weeks on tour I had boxes of papers to sort. I couldn’t stay on top of it all.

I rented a small office/storage space to clear the load (and to avoid the draconian home office rules in the area), but when the direct market collapsed in 1995, I could no longer afford the rent. So I had to move all of my work materials and inventory into my tiny condo. I lived out of boxes and crates for months and months. This was miserable and I was overwhelmed by the clutter. Major efforts to get rid of unsold inventory barely scratched the surface of the mess, and I was still stuck with furniture and art supplies and bookcases full of stuff that simply had no place in my home.

Fortunately, I found a professional organizer to help.

Not only did my professional organizer help me to learn techniques for cleaning clutter, she helped me to walk through the piles of stuff I simply could not seem to prioritize on my own.

I was utterly demoralized facing the load of work I had to do. It didn’t help that the demise of the whole self publishing thing and the sudden loss of money left me feeling down. Having piles of clutter in your home just makes it all worse. It was an immense help to have someone who had a lot of enthusiasm and good ideas, who also respected my privacy (something you can’t always expect from people you consider friends, and thanks again, Almost Helpful) come over to my home in the spirit of productivity. My professional organizer was a great, positive influence. It was the best $40 an hour I ever spent, and after just a few hours, we had made major progress in the piles of stuff.

I still use some of the techniques she taught me, and I am a borderline neat freak now: when I complain about clutter or mess, we are talking a tiny little percentage of the miserable detritus I accumulated while self publishing. Now, most of my organizing time is spent working on VERY old files and getting the art files in order (they have never been properly coordinated.)

I enjoy getting things in order and cleaning out files and dusting bookshelves. I know that the small, cumulative effort makes my whole life easier on a daily basis.

If you are a clutterbug, or would just like to have someone come in and give you some advice or tools to super-organize the kitchen cabinets or closets, you might want to try enlisting the aid of a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers.

This link at NAPO is open to the public and includes great tips for organizing your home or office, and also has information about how you can hire a professional organizer near you.

└ Tags: ,
7 Comments

George Orwell, Multi-tasking, Fairy Tales, Sherlock Holmes, Harlan Ellison, and other nifty stuff.

by Colleen Doran on May 22nd, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Culture, Culture, Literature, Fantasy, Culture, Film and Television, Culture, Literature, Creator Resources, Time Management

Harlan Ellison’s documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth will air on the Sundance Channel Monday:

For more than 50 years, Harlan Ellison has been a singular voice in American literature. Too often marginalized as an author of genre fiction (Ellison prefers the term “speculative fiction”) or influential, award-winning scripts for “The Outer Limits” and “Star Trek,” Ellison sits for a revealing cinematic portrait in Erik Nelson’s entertaining documentary. The notoriously combative, motor-mouthed Ellison appears in clips spanning a quarter century. Also featuring Robin Williams, who describes his friend as “a skin graft on a leper.”

Hat tip to the deeply nifty SF Signal.

Have a preview:

Buy the dvd. I did. Can’t wait to see it.

1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell:

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with “inflammation of the lungs” and told Koestler that he was “very ill in bed”. Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

Sherlock Holmes: man of logic and reason. His creator Arthur Conan Doyle fell for every spiritualist crackpot scam in the book:

He claimed to converse with the spirits of the dead. Virtually abandoning Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle churned out books on spiritualism and addressed vast audiences around the world on the subject. He proudly adopted the sobriquet “the St Paul of the New Dispensation”, ruffling some feathers along the way. In North America he clashed with Harry Houdini, an illusionist, who argued that all spiritualists’ “tricks” could be replicated by a competent magician.

In praise of the distractions of the internet. Print this one out. Read. Reread. Save it. Reread it again.

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

Isabel Paterson, the forgotten writer who gave Ayn Rand many of her ideas:

Her idea was simply to leave people alone to make their own investments, to earn profits and keep them, and to liquidate unprofitable enterprises. History backed her up. She remembered the nation’s relatively quick recovery from the economic crisis of her girlhood, the depression of the 1890s: “This country experienced bankruptcy in the nineties. Part of the loss was borne by foreign bondholders. That part of the situation is now reversed. It is a much worse bankruptcy. But that is all it is.” She knew that once the incompetent were permitted to go bankrupt, the competent could “pick up the pieces.”

An exploration of the history of fairy tales:

“It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition,” Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). “It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history … contradicts it.”

└ Tags: , , , , ,
7 Comments

Work is Good

by Colleen Doran on April 18th, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Culture, Creator Resources, Time Management

dscn0014
The film Amadeus dramatizes and romanticizes the divine origins of creative genius. Antonio Salieri, representing the talented hack, is cursed to live in the time of Mozart, the gifted and undisciplined genius who writes as though touched by the hand of God… Of course this is hogwash. There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose… As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.”

…routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

Twyla Tharp

The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life

└ Tags: , , ,
Comments Off

10 Things Your Boss Hates About You: Open Thread

by Colleen Doran on March 3rd, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Education, Creator Resources, Time Management

Blog migration has moved the original location of posts. If you came here looking for Lifestyles of the Rich and Stupid with info about Mark Twain et.al. go HERE.

This was written a few years ago, but Ten Things Your Boss Hates About You is still on point!

Since I just spent a couple of months meticulously researching yet another project, gathering hundreds of pages of images, reading multiple books on the subject, and filling two shelves with piles of source material, it looks like nothing has changed much for me! However, I am once again working with Joan Hilty who is accustomed to my slow build, and who knows once I get going, it’s all pretty smooth from there.

The kind of research I do isn’t really possible on a monthly comic: and it’s expensive. Consider I don’t get paid to research, I get paid for the finished work. The more time I spend gathering info, the less time I have to draw. But for the type of period work I am doing, I doubt I would be able to do a convincing job had I not taken the time to do the ground work.

Someone once referred to me as a “method cartoonist”: I “get in character” on every job. That’s probably why my work varies stylistically from gig to gig so much.

Anyway, on to the article.

OK, this is interesting: a list of the top ten things that drive bosses crazy.

I am guilty of too much initiative. I have the absurd habit of over-studying, over-thinking, over-referencing and over-analyzing just about every single solitary thing I do. Getting started is tooth-pulling trauma. I can’t begin until I have data and reference and mood music at the ready, and have spent weeks immersing myself in the project by reading every possible book on it.

For a four page story on Joan of Arc that would pay me no more than $1,000, I spent over a week just READING books on Joan of Arc. This turned out to be handy, because when the writer depicted Joan as killing men in battle, I was able to inform the editor that Joan had never actually killed anyone. Go me!

But all this initiative also meant that I had spent so much time researching the project that it actually COST ME MONEY to do the project. Moreover, my client didn’t hire me to obtain encyclopedic knowledge of Joan of Arc, they hired me to draw four pages and get them in on time.

Another classic example of this is all the time and effort that went into designing Reign of the Zodiac for DC Comics. I spent four months just designing the damned thing. It lasted eight issues.

I have now learned to inform my editors to expect a slow start from me on every single thing I do, then to step aside and watch as I rebound and get on schedule with accompanying cliches about dizzying speed. The editor is pulling their hair out wondering what the heck I am up to until then. My old clients are used to this. My new clients fear me until they learn not to.

With reference files in hand, and all my thinking thought out, I comfortably settle into a routine and produce quickly and smoothly. But too much initiative is my curse. Or my editor’s curse.

Here’s one of the top ten I thought could use spotlighting:

Although none of the managers came out and said that they hated their staff for talking over them in meetings, pointing out their errors in public, or preventing the bonus-related project coming in on time, Mann says it’s a major issue.

OK, I have had to give this some serious thought, because on the internet it’s easy to gripe and moan about everything that ever happened in your entire career. When you do, it’s not over a drink with a few friends at dinner, it’s in front of thousands of people.

I can’t think of a single freelancer who would appreciate it if all their professional gaffes were aired in public on a daily basis by their editors, but it does seem that the dopiest and pettiest of difficulties with editors and publishers (and other creators) are quickly and openly discussed. The vast majority of this stuff ought to be settled in house, not in public.

If a client is making a habit of not paying freelancers it’s one thing to go public (it’s a service to your fellow creators, in my humble opinion), but it’s another to go gonzo if there’s been a minor trafficking error, or someone didn’t get a photo credit, or some editor didn’t say hi to you when walking by at a convention.

I don’t know if creators realize how much damage they do to themselves with the public airing of the little stuff, and how unfair it is to dish it out when there is no way on Earth any of them would take it. How would freelancers feel if there was a public forum where editors posted every time freelancers missed a deadline? Or had to redraw something because they didn’t follow directions? Or made a list of the dopey lies freelancers tell?

c

Comments from the original article follow: ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
5 Comments

The Willpower Muscle

by Colleen Doran on February 27th, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Time Management

Another great article on stick-to-it-iveness vs/ natural talent. This one gave me a giggle because I found a lot of my own personality quirks in it.

Yet another study finds that it is the person with the self discipline – and not the naturally gifted – who is most likely to succeed in life. The kid who works harder goes farther. The naturally talented are often the naturally lazy.

But let’s take things a step further and consider willpower as a kind of mental muscle. It is a muscle that needs to be built up gradually. You won’t suddenly develop it overnight, any more than you can wake up Monday with a six pac on your abs after years of guzzling beer and doughnuts. You have to work at it and it takes time.

Willpower, like a muscle, can also be overtaxed. Those who exercise too much willpower too fast in too many areas may not find themselves better off, they may find themselves breaking down from the strain of trying to be…well, full of willpower all the time.

While the original article to which this blog post linked is no longer online, I have changed the link to another article which discussed the same material.

Here are two more articles on the same subject at The New York Times and at Inner Idea. I’ve left the original quotes from The Australian below.

What, then, can we do about this unfortunate tendency of the moral muscle to become fatigued with use? One option is to build it up and make it strong. Evidence is starting to accumulate that the moral muscle, like its physical counterpart, can become taut and bulging from regular exercise. People asked by experimenters to be self-disciplined about their posture for two weeks were afterwards stronger willed when it came to a test of physical endurance, compared with other people allowed to slouch about in their usual comfortable way during the fortnight.

By regularly exercising self-restraint and virtue in all areas of life (moral muscle cross-training, we may call it), we will come to resist temptations with the same casual ease with which a world-class athlete sprints to catch a train. That, at least, is the idea.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
Comments Off