Time Management for Indies: Balancing Creativity and Deadlines
It is no secret that most indies juggle quite a few balls in the air at the same time. Just to name a few core activities: writing code and art direction among other creative endeavours; networking and business development at times; and everybody’s beloved, marketing.
For those of you who are still in the game or those who have just joined the indie ranks due to the most recent layoffs, do you find it difficult in managing deadlines while figuring out how to be productive with the time you have? Then, keep reading. In fact, what I am going to share may be applicable to other creatives working in different industries.
Unobtanium
You can only use it but can’t create more of it. Maybe some, in the fictional sense, but time may very well be a good candidate for unobtanium.
The notion that we create time for some activities is kind of an illusion. We are only allocating the currently available and limited resource to something that will take away the said resource from another activity. So, in essence, we are never creating time, but we are prioritizing its use.
Let’s rule out the emergency reasons. Those should make the highest priority, for sure. Then, as an indie, what do you do with the time you have? More specifically, does it often feel like there is never enough time for most things? I bet guilt or frustration often accompanies the answer you give to these basic questions.
Getting Tactical
Whether you work in a solo setup or have a few team members, time management will be crucial in feeling satisfied at the end of the day. I’m only focusing on time management in this article since there may be different reasons that hinder your productivity: a clear separation of work and leisure space while working from home, a healthy diet, social connectedness, etc. I leave these topics out for the time being.
Ideally, by the end of the day, you should feel accomplished with the tasks you tackled during the day. If you are a night owl, reverse the timeline, but if you are constantly seeing time management as the reason for inefficiencies, then let’s discover a few tactics you can have in your arsenal.
Pomodoro
This technique has gained a lot of popularity due to its simplicity. Francesco Cirillo came up with this efficient method in the late 80s in the form of using a kitchen timer that looked like a tomato. Hence, the name for tomato in Italian.
It’s common to set a timer when you are baking because you don’t want to burn things. Baking is usually unforgiving with the amount of ingredients you have got to mix. It also often requires careful configuration and monitoring of time once the product is in the oven. So, a kitchen timer can be set to a predetermined length of time, and you go about your other business.
Conversely, working on something ad nauseam or for an unknown amount of time might be challenging. Most indies, or people working in other creative fields for the matter, won’t exactly know the precise measurement of ingredients, nor the time the task requires. Thus, Pomodoro is useful when you don’t have a clear idea of how much time you should spend on a particular effort.
This tactic suggests you use a period of 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. This will be one Pomodoro cycle. Repeat a few cycles, ideally four, and take a longer break of 20 minutes or half an hour. During the short and long breaks, remember to make it count. Those breaks should ideally involve anything that refreshes you. So, by the time you get back to the task at hand, you continue where you left off.
Sometimes, people change the duration of the periods and go with a more productive cycle of 50 minutes followed by a 10-minute break. I do remember this being the norm during elementary and high school. It was 45 to 15 minutes, and it left enough room for getting ready for the next cycle.
Most people find 6 Pomodoro cycles a day is enough, and 8 might be taxing. If you do 8 typical cycles end to end, that would be 4 hours of solid work. That’s about how much cognitive load a typical person can handle. The so called 8-hour workday in an office is at best 4 hours of productivity padded with a ton of preparation for upcoming tasks, bitching by the coffee machine, replying to emails, answering calls, and bitching a bit more by the water cooler.
There will be times when tasks can’t be interrupted harshly because some tasks need a longer period of warming-up time. So, we may need a different tactic.
Time Blocking
This is a tactic I use quite a lot these days. It has a sibling too, time tracking. For a while, I kept tracking how long some tasks took just so it would give me an idea. After I’ve got a good sense of how long I need in order to finish some tasks, I was able to allocate a much better adjusted amount of time.
This method lets you finish off a task that you’d rather not leave it hanging or leave it at a point where you can come back to it with less friction.
Therefore, I suggest you either directly start with blocking off time in chunks of 1 or 2 hours – ideally no more than 3 hours in one sitting – for longer tasks or practice time tracking for a while which is essentially starting a timer and clocking off when you are done with a task, like athletes do.
For example, how long does it take to write an article like this? This is a type of task that’s easier to see its progress and its end. Naturally, some things are not so easy to gauge, like how long does it take to finish an indie game? Since you can’t finish the whole thing in one go, it creates this uneasy feeling that you should be working on it continuously. Eventually, as you keep working on your game, day in and day out, it sucks time from other efforts like marketing.
However, if you were to block time and put a cap on how long you should write code for your game vs networking or any other activity you deem important, you’ll at least have some semblance of control. If not over the outcome, at least over the execution of it.
In practice, although everybody is different, I’ve found that I function better if I have two major events going on during the day. To give an example, today was dedicated to writing this article and catching up on emails. Tomorrow might be for shooting a video. It’s a big task by itself, so it might very well occupy my whole day, but for the sake of breaking the monotony and boosting productivity, I may also spend some time on watching presentations from previous online conferences.
Folks who are old enough will remember that computers, more specifically hard drives, had to be defragmented. Fragmentation occurred when the operating system placed your files or chunks of it in the hard drive in a fashion that was easier to store at that moment. Over time, the longer you used your computer, the more scattered the files were. So, you needed to defragment to move things closer to each other for faster access. Similarly, if you are going to use time blocking, your day may get fragmented to the point that you are no longer able to focus on any given task long enough or productively.
Activities such as back-to-back meetings during a conference – although usually each 30 minute long – should still count as one large chunk. What I caution you with is that you don’t divide your day into 1 hour of reading followed by 1 hour of email checking, succeeded by many other activities like writing code, drawing art, networking, etc. each taking an hour. If you are able to pull that off for longer than one week, please book a time with me and let me know of your secret. Most likely, you won’t be able to sustain the scattered nature of it.
Instead, you may want to have a day for coding + QA. Then, the next day for marketing which may also involve networking. So, gather your phone or video calls and try to have them on the same day. You get the idea. Over time, you are going to notice a pattern that will indicate where you need to increase or decrease your efforts. After all, you can’t improve something unless you measure and track it.
This tactic is useful when there is no seeming or immediate deadline and still there must be an ongoing effort that goes into finishing a project like a video game. On the contrary, how will you organize yourself when there is a more precise date in the horizon?
Working Backwards
I’m not talking about undoing your work, but rather, how you can work things out in reverse order. So, for something to be delivered or finished on a specific date, you’ve got imagine what it would take to get there.
Need a concrete example? A flight! We are not interested in the possibility of a cancelled flight. Your plane will take off no matter what whether you get to the airport or not. So, you know you must be out of the house at some point. The airport staff will most likely accept you even if you show up with no luggage, but chances are you need to bring some stuff with you. To be able to do that, you probably need to pack your stuff beforehand but not too early since, more often than not, you use the same stuff on a daily basis.
So, there will be a sweet spot when you start getting ready to hit the finish line. In some sense, you work things out in a backward order. This is easier when a task is well-defined thanks to knowing the interim steps because you have prior experience on how long the steps will take. If you don’t have firsthand experience, it might still be possible to get help in this category. Following the flight example, you might probably find out how long it takes to travel between your house and the airport.
It might be prudent to leave some room for surprises. Thus, as an indie, if you are to submit a demo to a competition or a publisher, you can utilize this tactic.
Wrapping Up
These are some of the techniques I use frequently for time management, among other productivity methods such as OKR, the Eisenhower Box, etc. There are so many tools that fall into the category of project management such as Trello boards or Kanban, Agile scorecard, and what have you. Time and project management go hand in hand at times, but I simply wanted to focus on the time aspect since better time management often results in smoother project management.
I figure this won’t be the last time I will talk about this. Perhaps I’ll write more on time management and productivity since I notice many indies bring this up with a hint of guilt. All in good time.