I’ve been meaning to write about how I organized my time to make The Do-Over for a while now, so here it is: a guide on how I organize my life to make a graphic novel.
I’m also adding some methods that I tried that didn’t quite work because I think it helps guide my reasoning towards the methods I do use, but also because it might be useful to someone else! Who knows!
THE CONTEXT:
When we got a deal for our first graphic novel (The Do-Over), I was excited—and nervous! I had never drawn a full book before! I looked around for some guidance, but most of the guides/trackers/etc I found online were some variation of “figure out how many hours/pages you need to do per day, then work on it every (week)day”. Which is a nice, consistent approach! The problem is that my schedule is anything but consistent!!
On top of making comics, I work at our local Planetarium. It’s a fun job, but it’s also pretty far from being a conventional 9-to-5. Sometimes it means going to work on the weekends for observation nights, or having to prepare a talk, or there’s a cool discovery happening and I have to drop everything to read all about it!! every week is different!
With things being like that, I knew that a conventional “just work on the book for X hours every day” wasn’t going to work. From there I started trying different approaches, which I divide in 2 categories:
- Progress tracking (how much I’m getting done per week)
- Time tracking (how many hours I’m working per week)
They’re technically two separate things, but they work together to give me a clearer picture of my progress.
1. PROGRESS TRACKING
Drawing a graphic novel is a HUGE task—for context, The Do-Over is a little over 220 pages long, and we delivered pages in stages (layouts, pencils, inks, colors) with revisions in between. Thinking about finishing 200+ pages is overwhelming, so we break it down: how many pages do I need to finish per month? per week? per day?
To me, a month is too big and I can’t work the same amount every day, so tracking how much I got done per week seemed like a good middle ground.
I started with the simplest possible approach: I made a bar with the number of pages I needed to get done per week, then filled it in as I did them. I did it in my weekly planner and it looked like this:
Which is all well and good, assuming I’d hit my weekly quota every week. But then I didn’t hit my weekly quota, and so next week I had to do my weekly quota AND catch up with the previous week!! So soon enough, things were looking like this:
…which leads to nothing but anxiety and frustration!!
So, after a few more iterations, I landed on my current system for progress tracking, which looks like this:
Basically, it’s all the pages I have to work on, next to a calendar with the time I have until the deadline. Every day I fill in my progress, while also filling in the passing of time on the calendar. I switch colors every week so I can have an idea of how much I get done per week, but if I don’t make the number of pages I wanted in a given week it’s no big deal—I just know I have to work more the following week(s) to catch up! You can see from the picture that I rarely get the same amount of work done every week, but hey, as long as I make it to the end…!
I also make these on a loose sheet on paper that I stick by my desk so I can CONSTANTLY look at it:
This system helps me keep good track of my progress, along with a good idea of how much time I have left until the next deadline. But to get stuff done every week, I have to put in the hours. Which leads to…
2. TIME TRACKING
I knew I needed to track how much time I was working per week, so I started with what I knew best from my university days: good ol’ pomodoros. Quick summary for those who haven’t used them before:
- You set a timer for 25 minutes (“a pomodoro”)
- You work, uninterrupted, for those 25 minutes
- When you finish, you take a 5 minute break
- After finishing 4 pomodoros, take a longer break (usually 20-25 minutes)
Using this technique really helped me in the past, so I figured I’d do the same to block out some time to work AND use it as a measure to track time. I’d count each pomodoro as a 30-minute block (easier to sum up than 25-minute blocks) and wrote them on my planner like this:
However, I eventually started having some problems with pomodoros: what if something/someone interrupts me? Do I write down how much time I did and then do the remaining time? Start a whole new pomodoro? What if I have less than 25 minutes to work on this? If I can’t make a full pomodoro, why bother? Things were happening around me all the time and carving out long blocks of uninterrupted time just wasn’t working anymore.
I ended up switching to a different type of time tracking, using an app called Toggl (post not sponsored). Toggl is super simple: you define your different projects, press play when you start working, and press stop when you’re done. Easy!! If you’re consistent at tracking your time, you end up with some nice statistics like these:
No matter how I tracked time, at the end of each week I’d sum up my total work time and add it to my ✨ fancy little time graph ✨—here’s a couple of them:
As you can see, this is anything but consistent! Some weeks I didn’t get anything done, and other weeks I got a ton of hours in. You can also see I used to track finished pages next to my work hours, but I stopped doing it when I switched to my current progress tracker.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, using both trackers together has helped me to have an idea of how well I’m doing at getting things done on time, which is not only helpful for the project at hand, but also to better estimate deadlines going forward. Now I set an average number of pages that I try to hit per week (about 10 for pencils or inks, 20 for colors), and then estimate how many hours I need to work on average each week to hit those numbers. Right now it’s an average of 10 hours per week, but as you see, I rarely do that… (￣▽￣*)ゞ
Sometimes life or other work stuff get in the way and I fall behind, but then I know I’ll just have to clear my schedule further down the line so I can focus more on book stuff…it’s a weird balance, it’s very unpredictable, but it’s what works for me right now.
I hope this was interesting and maybe helped spark some ideas! If you have any thoughts or comments I’d love to hear about it 🙂
