Sunday Mailbag: Daily Routine?

Q: What is your daily routine like as an entrepreneur? For example, do you work on the illustration part of your business in the morning and blog/mail out orders, and other business tasks in the afternoon? I suppose it varies if you have a quick deadline that comes up out of the blue. Just curious how you plan out/schedule your day to be the most productive yet give yourself time to exercise and hang with your family?

A: The great thing about working from home is you don’t have to go anywhere, you are always in the office. The bad thing about working at home is you are always in the office. that makes it hard to separate work time from family time.

I have a loose daily and weekly schedule (office work/answering emails and such on Monday AM., Catch up work on Wednesdays, etc) that I start out trying to stick to, but deadlines and other factors come into play, so it’s important that you roll with the punches and not get sidetracked so far that you give up on a task you meant to do because it just got a little tougher to do it. If some unexpected task takes you away from the task at hand, it’s important to get BACK to the task at hand, even if it means you don’t get it done. It’s too easy to say “I can’t finish this now, I’ll just do it tomorrow.” That’s the worst.

I’ve found the two keys to keeping on track in a home studio are setting realistic goals and prioritizing.

Setting realistic goals leads to more success and less of the giving up and moving the goals back. It’s best to set small goals throughout the day. One small goal might be “I am not going to break for lunch until I get these three panels inked.” That keep me on task, since it’s not that tough a goal and I get a reward after. Making your goals too tough, like “I am going to ink three full pages today” sets you up for failure, because if that task is going to take 9-12 hours of solid work, it’s too easy to step away and say think you’ll work a little later. And a little later. Suddenly you only have two pages done and just a start on the third and it’s midnight and you are really tired. Then you start the next day feeling behind. Set smaller more realistic goals you can reach throughout the day.

Prioritizing means putting the tasks that NEED to be done ahead of the ones you WANT to be done. And example might be finding yourself working on a blog post when you NEED to finish inking a page…

…. GOTTA GO.

Thanks to Jason Sauer for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!