ANDY FISH

ANDY FISH is a comic book artist

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

The 90 Minute Work Schedule

Tom Grady and I with students
I was asked to clarify the 90 minute workday I spoke about a few weeks ago-- and I'm glad because I think it needs some clarifying.

I don't JUST work 90 minutes, I work 90 minutes at a time with a break in between.  When I'm not on tight deadline I work 90 minutes with a half hour break between.  During the break I make coffee, I check my email, I browse Amazon-- all the stuff I would normally waste my entire day doing.

When I am on deadline those breaks are only 5 minutes-- and in those I check my email and that's about it.

Here's a typical DEADLINE week-- as per my dashboard on my iMac


You can see on Monday and Wednesday I start the workday at 10am-- that means I have to get up, have breakfast and walk the dog before 10.  On Tuesday I get an earlier start at 9am.

So for example-- my studio needed a good cleaning-- and I wanted to get to it on Sunday but didn't, so I scheduled it for Monday.  I had to write a brief plot so splitting the 90mins between that and cleaning seemed to make sense.    Getting into it, I realized I needed more time so I scheduled another 90 minutes just to clean-- so from 1030am until 1pm I cleaned the studio.

Took lunch from 1-130 and then worked on assignments all the way until 430 when I left for my WAM class.  When I get back I plan on ninety minutes on the heavy bag, shower and then bed.  This will lead to Tuesday.

Working this way may seem crazy anal-- I know it would to me if our roles were reversed, but I find this works ridiculously well and eliminates all the "five minute" interruptions that sometimes derail my entire workday.