A professional writer-person sent me this question and also said, "I think it'd be better if you didn't use my name if you choose to use this question on your site. There's a decent chance that one or more of my editors will read it." So here we go…
I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how you handle multitasking and time management in your career. Even after several years of freelancing, I still have trouble with these areas. I try to be realistic with myself about how much time a particular project will take, but I still often run into trouble. Things either take more time than I originally anticipated, or worse, I get overly-ambitious with a project but I don't fully realize how overly-ambitious I got until I'm in the middle of it.
You always seem to have a lot of different things going on: Writing for comics, writing for TV, voice directing. How do you manage it all, particularly when your various deadlines are converging? Do you have set hours for each project? Do you only work on certain things on certain days, or what? Any tips you could provide would be helpful.
My answer — and I know this won't help you a lot — is that you just do it. You stay up later, you cancel social engagements you wish you didn't have to cancel, you work harder, you get someone else to run errands for you so you can stay at the keyboard, you do what you have to do but you do it. I have rarely found it to be that difficult but when it is, it helps to not agonize over how difficult it is. Agonizing won't get the pages written. Writing will.
It has helped that I have worked in a number of situations where I absolutely had to finish something by a certain, no-getting-out-of-it deadline. On TV shows, we would sometimes need to rewrite a scene while the actors were waiting for it…or it had to be done by 5 AM so it could be retyped and copied and waiting for the cast when they arrived at 9 AM.
Once on a live TV telecast, I had twenty minutes to rewrite a speech before Lorne Greene would be delivering it before all of America…so I really had about ten minutes because I had to write it and then go over it with Mr. Greene. I would have had even less time but I decided to write it on the cue cards. This was probably a violation of some union regulation but no one was looking so I sat down at the cue card guy's work table, grabbed his big black marker and a stack of blank cards and wrote the speech out on the cards. Fortunately, I have really good lettering skills and I got it done in time.
If you have a few experiences like that, it makes you less panicky when you promised the script to your editor in New York five days from now. The trick then is to approach the work with the same single-minded devotion to getting it written even when Lorne Greene isn't waiting to go over it with you before going on live television. Once in a while on a project when I feel like knocking off for a while, I'll imagine Lorne glaring at me, waiting for it.
So that's kind of my answer — shut up and write! — but I have a few tips to add. By the numbers…
- Assume everything will take much longer (at least double) what you expect. Leaving things to the last minute is just asking to get into a bind. I know guys who'll get an assignment and figure, perhaps correctly, "That'll just take me a day." So they wait until the day before it's due to tackle it and…well, that's just brain-dead stupid. You deserve to be fired or unhired if you do that…because you might be sick that day or have to drive a loved one to the hospital or your computer could break or your power could go out…or it could even take way longer than your estimate.
- If you keep finding yourself in deadline dilemmas, maybe you need to take on less work. Yes, yes…I know how it is when you're booked solid and then someone offers you a dream project and/or a dream paycheck. But sometimes, you have to remember you're a finite resource and say no…and there's a great argument for not waiting until the last second. Maybe you could have done that dream job if you hadn't.
- If you're juggling a number of projects, compartmentalize. When you're working on Job A, give it your all. Don't let your mind keep wandering to Job B or Job C. The best way to get to Job C is to get Jobs A and B out of the way first. Usually.
- Staying up late may feel heroic and there are times when you just have to do it. But when you reach the point of writing ten words an hour, maybe you'd be better off going to bed and waking up to resume writing at a brisker pace in the morning. This is assuming the script isn't due first thing in the morning.
- Here's one I learned the hard way in the comic book business. An editor offers you a job but says, "I absolutely have to have it by next Monday." You say fine, yes, sure, you can get it done by Monday…but it's an assignment you can't finish or maybe even start on until that editor sends you certain materials you need. When you will receive them is out of your control so don't commit to a deadline that isn't on a sliding scale. In this case, I would say, "I will finish it X days after I receive the materials from you." Otherwise, they'll get them to you late but still expect you to meet that Monday deadline.
I used to like juggling lots of assignments, especially if they were very different from one another. I was never happier as a writer than I was during a few periods when I was simultaneously writing animation scripts, live-action scripts and comic book scripts — and often, more than one in each category. At one point for instance, I recall working at the same time on Blackhawk for DC, DNAgents for Eclipse and Groo for whatever publisher we hadn't put out of business at that moment — three very different comics for three different publishers and drawn by three different artists who required different kinds and formats of input from me.
I got something out of each kind of writing — animation, live-action and comics — that I didn't get out of the other two. I still do all three but rarely all at the same time and not in such multiples. I'm not sure I have the energy these days to keep that many balls in the air concurrently. So I guess there's a sixth one…
- Learn how to pace yourself. And that may require being brutally honest with yourself about your health, how much sleep you really need, family obligations and many other things that do not relate directly to writing. You may even have to steel your guts and admit you're not as young as you used to be.
It also might help not to start a blog but so far, I haven't found that to be as much of an impediment as one might think.
