I'm not back. It just looks that way. I'm still battling a deadline and you'll know when I finish because regular posting will resume. Or if you're in Southern California, maybe you'll hear me snoring.
People often ask me — in fact, I think I'm asked a version of it in the video below — how one deals with deadlines. The answer is to just do the work. Do it as quickly as you can without losing your perspective on what you're doing…and if you're a professional of any tenure, you should know how that feels. But you just have to do it and not, for example, spend a lot of time agonizing over how you can't do it or how impossible it will be to do it. If you have twelve hours to complete something, worrying for two hours is just going to leave with you ten hours to do what you feared you couldn't do in twelve.
It's also important to keep the importance in perspective: Don't trivialize it but don't overstate it, especially to yourself. My first agent used to say about almost anything I was writing, "Hey, it ain't the moon shot. Nobody dies if you screw up." That can be real comforting to remember.
But mainly, the most important thing to remember when you have an impossible deadline is that it helps to not spend time writing blog posts about how to meet deadlines. I think I'll try that.
This is the second part of my interview for the Animation Guild and it starts with a rerun of the last minute or two of the first part. I talk about all sorts of things but mostly myself…