The Art of Balancing Multiple Projects (Patreon)

So here's a thing I never thought I'd be any good at: multi-tasking. I cannot read my phone and listen to my girlfriend at the same time, so balancing three comics, the patreon, a novel, commissions and all my other real life responsibilities seems a bit like asking a snake to tap dance. But I've somehow managed to get to a point in my life where having multiple projects makes me more creative, more productive, and just overall happier? What the heck?

So I thought I'd talk a bit about that. Because who hasn't had a project or passion that they wanted to explore, but just felt like they never had the time to fit it in?

Disclaimer: I haven't always been very good at this. The thing about learning to juggle is you have to drop the ball a few times first. You learn while you're chucking balls all over the place. I dropped a LOT of balls before I managed to balance my workload in a way that was healthy and manageable. So many. I still drop a couple from time to time, but I'm a lot better at picking them back up and carrying on now than I was.

To give you an idea of how the heck I balance all this stuff, I thought I'd show you my routine. Give you a little peek into my weird day.

Patreon Comics/Perks & Commissions: 9AM-2PM Mon-Fri

Static Crush Online Serial: 2PM-5PM  Mon-Fri

The Crooked Kind comic: a weird one. It's co-authored and drawn with a friend of mine, and we do our best to make 1-2 chapters a year (40 pgs total). We take half the pages each and work on them on weekends/evenings. The comic is inked/flat coloured so it  takes way less time for me than Cinderfrost (approx. 5 hrs a page as opposed to 8-10hrs). This project is pretty laid back until we reach our deadline (usually a con). My co-author is fairly new to comics and tends to procrastinate, so by the deadline I'm usually helping her finish her pages. This crunch period is by far the most exhausting part of my routine. I'm too old for all-nighters so I just cram the extra work in wherever I can. Thankfully it only happens once or twice a year. 

Real life happens on the evenings and weekends when I'm not working on TCK.

This schedule might sound a bit crazy, but it actually works out pretty well. I do have most of my evenings and weekends to chill, socialize, play video games, exercise, go for walks etc. It only gets hectic near TCK deadlines. Thing is, up until recently, I worked exclusively on the Patreon and commissions from 9-5, Mon-Fri, and it took most of that time to do it! So how did I take 3 hours a day out of that schedule for a novel without losing progress on Patreon/commissions?

This is the weird bit. I'd spoken to my therapist about this pretty frequently. I was slowing down. Work that usually took me a day or two was taking much longer, and I couldn't really figure out why. I wasn't tired. I didn't feel stressed or burnt out. I just felt oddly sluggish and disengaged. She suggested I make time for another project, to give myself some variety. She theorized that maybe my sluggishness was just due to repetition. I'd been working on the Patreon, and these comics, for literal years of my life and though I still loved and was committed to them, I was feeling a bit stagnant and needed something new to try. I was worried about overburdening myself, but decided to take the risk anyway. 

I took that advice, and pretty much immediately reverted back to my previous efficiency. It reinvigorated a lot of my enthusiasm for the work I'd been doing, because it wasn't the ONLY work I was doing anymore. A few years ago, if someone asked me how many projects I could balance, I'd probably have said 2, tops. Now it's like... 4-5 and I feel great.

The whole thing's definitely been a process. The Patreon started out just as a vehicle for Cinderfrost and expanded from there. New projects were added in bits and pieces. The routine I have no is a foundation I built one brick at a time. I figured I'd end this off with a few pieces of advice if you're looking to devote some more time to a project you just haven't been able to fit in yet.

The first tip I have is to start small. Carve a tiny chunk of time out of the day for something you want to start. A half-hour is enough. Where you find that time is up to you, whether it means waking up a little earlier or less time watching TV, but barring those who work two jobs, most of us have the time somewhere. I learned this habit from Nanowrimo. Writing a novel is a mammoth task, but writing a paragraph, a sentence, a word is not. The words are like those bricks I was talking about. One at a time.

The other bit of advice is to make it a habit. Do it every day, or every other day, but make it regular. Don't skip out on weeks at a time. If you need time off because you're sick or something else takes priority, just make sure you come back to it later, but don't leave a project languishing for months. It's so much harder to come back to it later. I found this out the hard way with Grayscale. It was another collaborative project, and my co-author's education took priority, so it went on hiatus. By the time she could return to it, I'd grown a lot as an artist and could no longer look at the first pages without cringing. 

On that last point, don't restart a project just because it's flawed. Finish it. Revise later. Starting is hard, but finishing is harder. Every novel I've ever finished took a herculean effort compared to starting, but I learned so much more from it than from the stories I'd never completed. I know a number of people who restart their comics/stories ALL the time because it's not 'perfect.' It will never ever be perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. Fuck perfect, just finish it.

Don't beat yourself up if it isn't the masterpiece you wanted, or if you don't manage to finish it the first time. Sometimes quitting is necessary too. Sometimes a project just isn't working, but you learned from it and now it's time to move onto the next thing. Creatives tend to give themselves a really hard time for, like, EVERYTHING. Don't do that. You're sapping your own creative energy and wasting it on self-deprecation. 

If you need a break, schedule a break. Set a date for when you're going to return to the thing, complete with notifications/reminders. Breaks are necessary sometimes, but returning to a project after one is hard. It's no longer fresh in your mind and you'll spend the first week reacquainting yourself with the material where you left off. That's normal and once you're over that hurdle, you can come back to it all fresh.

That's it. That's my advice. Maybe it's useful or maybe it's dirty dish water - your mileage may vary, but I hope you found some of it mildly insightful. As always, thank you so much for making my time investment in my passion projects possible! It's been quite a journey <3

To finish, here's a picture of some of the succulents I'm repotting, because it's spring and they deserve new clean houses.