Hey everyone! Julian here with this week’s OgreWare progress update. This week we’re discussing deadlines, especially the complexities of self-imposed deadlines for independent creators.
Independent creators and artists face a lot of unique challenges. From the price hike in small printing runs for writers and comic artists, to the difficulties that arise in launching advertising campaigns without backing by a larger corporation, indie creators are fighting an uphill battle. Even in today’s “amateur age,” with the revolution of online syndication and distribution allowing non-professionals to technically “go pro,” while it is relatively easy to get your work out there, it’s another story entirely to manage creation of consistent content. In a few words, “anyone can publish anything, but not just anyone can create something successful.”
One challenged faced by today’s independent creators – like myself, as an artist, and OgreWare, as an indie game designer – is to create consistent content. Actually, I’ve struggled so much with that challenge that “Create Consistent Content” was my phrase of the year for 2018. It’s all too easy, when one has fewer followers and sometimes still a day job, to “work at your own pace” rather than churning out content at peak efficiency. Peak efficiency often isn’t reached until one has supervisors or clients and – therefore – externally enforced deadlines.
Deadlines, in my humble opinion, get a bad rap. We joke about how “the 12 hours before the deadline is just tears and all the work at once,” and how “it’s called a deadline because it’ll kill you,” but deadlines are actually a creator’s best friend.
An example from my own artistic life: For 15 years, I studied manga without creating a single comic. Not. One. Comic. I had one webcomic that ran to 100 pages, but never went anywhere – or at least not enough to justify printing it. It was only when I was 27 and began setting hard deadlines for myself – and having an accountability buddy for my creative work – that I finished a comic, “You Are In Love,” in 2017. And then another the same year – “The Cheyenne Line.” 2018 has seen a third comic, a ton of freelance design and a good portion of a Tarot deck, and we’re only in August.
Think about that. 15 years of essentially warm-up, and then in a year and a half, three comics, half a Tarot deck, and substantial freelance work.
The difference? Well, getting my nose to the damn grindstone…and deadlines.
These days, I set myself weekly, monthly, and yearly deadlines. They all go into my planner with checkboxes next to them. If I meet the deadline, I color the box green. If I fail, I color it red. Looking over the planner and seeing the patterns – more red? more green? – helps me to get an idea of how I’m doing, whether I need to budget my time differently, and so on.
OgreWare is taking on a similar challenge, and it’s actually going to involve these blog posts. From now on, Thursdays will be a weekly progress update. We’ll discuss what OgreWare has been doing for their current project. This will give you, the audience, a clearer window into the OgreWare world, but with any luck it will also help to keep OgreWare on track and on task with their work.
We all slip into patterns of non-productivity, and deadlines are good at keeping us away from that tempting spiral of dragging our feet and spending too much time on the new WoW expansion.
I’ve personally seen the power of deadlines, and I am producing more work (and improving at a faster rate) than ever before in my life. It’s taken 15 years, but I’ve finally learned: deadlines can be, in fact, lifesavers.
I look forward to sharing OgreWare’s progress updates with you, and I’ll bring you the first one next Thursday.
~Admin Julian