By far the rarest of all your commodities will be time. There aren’t enough hours in the day and that’s why you’ll need all your management skills to carve out time to do the important things.
What with context switching (changing tasks), interruptions from the team, bosses, messaging apps, email, real life, family, art meetings and team management, it’s easy to be overwhelmed and feel slowly worn down, like being nibbled to death by a thousand ducks.
Fear not! There is light at the end of the tunnel. There are simple processes you can put in place to help yourself out, improving the quality of the entire team in the long run. Read these two lines and you’ll be on your way to looking after yourself and your time.
Remember this: There will always be too much work.
And then this: Prioritise time for yourself.
I can’t stress how important understanding this is. Give yourself time to breathe, to plan and to execute. The next few pages outline some methods I used to get back on top regardless of what the day had in store for me. I could work out a task list, attend my meetings, and get some artwork done. I developed these techniques as an AD, but they’ll work just as easily for you as Lead Artist.
• Create boundaries
• Prioritise yourself
• Track your time and effort
• Learn how to plan effectively
I predominantly worked in large open-plan offices, which are great for team communication and for a manager to see what their team is working on. The downside is that you’re accessible to everyone, all the time, increasing the chances of being interrupted on someone’s whim (especially if they ignore the headphones-on rule).
So, let’s find out how I used the techniques above and how they might work for you.
On starting work, are you instantly swamped from the minute you log on? Do you struggle to think for yourself and get clarity away from distractions? Do you beg to be left alone, and all this before you get your first coffee/tea?
I’m normally later to start work than most of my team (and I leave later). It takes me a bit of time to wind up, but your team might already be working and in full flow by the time you switch on your PC. Great that they’re eager and working already, but bad because there’s a slow and steady backlog of issues for you to look over already.
An early lesson in management is to set boundaries. It’s for you, your team, and the company.
• Make some rules – Think of it like this, you’re a critical component to the smooth working of this art machine, and to do your best, you need to treat yourself like you would one of your staff (with compassion). So, allow yourself the time to settle in before the day whisks you away in a flurry of problems.
• Settling-in period – Mine was simple, it was this (and still is): No tea? No questions! Until I have a cup of tea in my hand and my computer is on, then no questions can be asked of me and there can be no interruptions. Please don’t bug me about problems or issues or anything until I’ve had the chance to settle in and get my head in the game.
• Time slots – Rather than your team interrupting your train of thought at any point, you have the option of assigning some slots in the day, in which it’s your time to concentrate, with no interruptions. This will allow you to plan and get ahead or do some artwork.
• Communicate – Always let your team know the rules by which you are operating. Give them fair warning if you are going to change the system. While you and the AD have to be super agile, your team may feel less flexible.
That’s what I did, and it sounds simple, right? It is simple, and it was super effective. I’m sure you’ll find ways that work for you, and these things don’t have to be set in stone. If something isn’t working, change it up! That’s the wonder of being a team leader, you can make changes and be agile. Your job is to keep the art mojo flowing, and that includes you!
Some people feel uncomfortable making simple rules like this, but it’s all about boundaries. You set them, you expect people to follow them. If someone comes to you before you are ready, unless their expression says that they are about to die as they have deleted the whole of the project, then it can wait and you can politely say, ‘I’m getting my tea, settling in and I’ll be with you shortly’.
(NB. You can’t pull this trick with your own boss unfortunately – that’s a one-way street!)
It’s normal for a team to have a shared calendar to allow producers to know what you’re doing in your day. If large group meetings are being arranged, the calendar shows when everyone is free.
This is both a blessing and a curse. The upside is booking meetings fast with no need to ask when everyone is free, but the downside is that meetings can fill up your day. Left unchecked, you can experience days where you don’t have any time to do anything creative or for high-level thinking.
I book appointments into my calendar, because that way I can control my day and week to a certain extent, enabling me to assign blocks of time to get tasks done. This gives me permission not to rush through a task, as before this I often experienced a large unseen pressure to get things done as quickly as possible, because of the volume of other tasks waiting.
My other strategy was to book a 30-minute slot in a meeting room, just for me and for my morning planning session.
Me time (with my cup of tea) – I figured out that if I took my laptop and tea to a small meeting room for only 30 minutes, I could plan out my day. This is what I would do at the height of the chaos:
• Scan emails to quickly review for anything ‘on fire’, that needs attention.
• Scan meetings booked for that day/week, making note of any requiring preparation.
• Work out a prioritised task list for the day. I recommend choosing three tasks, and if you can get them done, then you are doing well (if your calendar is busy).
• Note down who you need to speak to that day.
• Schedule appointments in your own calendar to assign the three tasks for that day.
Doing this gives you full knowledge of your priorities so you can push back on any tasks should someone try to add extra to your day, particularly anything of a lower priority. Of course, this isn’t foolproof, and there may be meetings that are just higher priority, which you’ll have to make way for.
Overall, I find these simple techniques the best method for staying sane and on track, plus keeping overall anxiety at bay, so I could regain focus and start ticking items off my task list.
It’s good to know where you’re spending your time. On the one hand, you might be working hard and just want to track the hours logged, but on the other, you might find yourself constantly flitting from one task to another and losing time from context switching.
You might want some extra data to help optimise your working process, to figure out where you are losing time due to interruptions, how to better estimate task deadlines and when your most creative time of day occurs.
Outlook – A recent addition to your email client now helps with monitoring and managing time tasks and meetings. Outlook sends emails informing you of your recent activity, who you spent time with, where your most productive time was, where most interruptions were, and whether tasks have been completed. It’s simple but effective.
Company tracker – Your organisation might operate some sort of check in/check out software, logging when you start your day, when you have lunch, when you leave, maybe even when you have a comfort break. It can feel a little big brother initially, but you soon get used to it.
ManicTime – More for freelancers, but a useful tooI in your management kitbag. It sits in the background tracking your workday, files, software used, proportion of your day spent in meetings. Non-intrusive and easy to use, with added benefits of graphs for data analysis. The free-to-use version provides the basics, which can be enough, but the paid version offers additional insights into your working life. (I’m not endorsed by ManicTime!)
You’ll want to check with your IT department before installing software, to make sure your data is protected, and that they’re happy to have the software on one of their machines.
TIP: Give it a go to see where you are spending your time. You might be pleasantly surprised and find some extra ways of making your days more productive with fewer interruptions. Or realise that a task takes double the time to complete than you normally estimate.
As a Lead Artist, you’ll spend plenty of time planning your team’s workload. You want your team to be effective, happy and productive, so how do you get ahead of the curve?
Simple! Plan, then plan some more!
One of my favourite quotes is ‘failure to plan is planning to fail’ (credited to Benjamin Franklin). It’s true; how can you hope to succeed if your plan is non-existent? Some companies attempt to wing it and then spend their time in crunch. Games are complex, which no one is denying, but there are ways of planning and estimating that can improve your art team’s work life. The goal is to provide a steady stream of work with a few peaks but little wasted effort overall. If only it were simple and straightforward…
• There’s no perfect plan – This goes without saying. You won’t know all the details of the project, and there will be some guesstimating based on previous experience. However, everything can and should be broken down into a series of tasks. Working with your Producer and Art Director you can figure out an initial master plan.
• Time-boxing – A simple method for estimating the time needed for each stage of the process, taken from the Agile Scrum framework. On past projects, I have time-boxed levels and assets and it proved to be highly effective. For example, it would look something like this:
• Block-out art – 2 weeks
• First pass art – 4 weeks
• Hero asset creation – 4 weeks
• Second pass art – 4 weeks
• Polish – 2 weeks
If necessary, it can be more granular and apply to an individual asset, say a space crate or suit of armour, but how granular is often down to how the company runs.
• Plan B – Always have a back-up plan, because you can bet your house that your original plan will change, whether it is by an executive, publisher, or a re-prioritisation of team members.
• Buffer – When you are estimating time, it’s natural to underestimate, not to consider possible problems (you can’t know the future, but could you have foreseen some of them?) or to fail to account for the interruptions and time lost for context switching. So, one standard practice is to build in a small buffer of (extra) time, especially for large complex assets. Your artists might not know you have a buffer, and sometimes it’s hidden. An artist’s instinct is always to fill up the time assigned, making their artwork as strong as possible.
• Prepare to be agile – You want your senior artists to be flexible, so let them know that. You don’t want team members who constantly create blockages or are inflexible. There are always options and solutions, which not everyone might like, but with your producer’s help, it’s up to you and your team to come up with the magic plan of action, with built-in options!
There are so many books out there to help you with your task planning, so I’ve kept this section simple, short and to the point. Planning, like artwork, is something to be practised and polished, and, while at first it might feel foreign, you’ll soon become expert at the Excel sheet.