In the introduction to my daily blogging experiment, Martin asked this trifecta of questions:

1) What is your typical day like?
2) How many projects sit on your desk waiting to be done and how do you prioritize them?
3) Have you ever thought about doing a Shadowrun comic book?

Let’s deal questions 2 and 3 today, in reverse order, and I’ll tackle 1 on a later date:

3: Thought about? Absolutely. We’ve seen a few proposals for it [and if any comic book companies and/or comic book creators want to address us with proposals or pitches, you can send them right to info@shadowrun4.com and I'll make sure they get read by the right people.] There’s surely a market for a Shadowrun comic series, but could Catalyst Game Labs break into the comic book market on their own? Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question — all I know is that we’d need to do a lot of research before making a decision on it.

2: Difficult question to answer — I think the safe answer is “lots.”

I’d have to sit down an write out a list — and then get someone else to check that list and add more to it — to figure out all the projects that are in some way “on my plate” at any given time.

I’d estimate that at any given time I have 5-8 projects ongoing that actually require consistent attention, and usually 1-3 of those require considerable attention [laying out an entire book, figuring out how the covers for all our novels will look, etc].

Then there are the projects that jump out at you and need to be done Right This Minute [these are usually advertising related].

Does it count as a “project” if all I’m doing is making sure someone else’s work is up to our quality standards?

As for priorities: This is a huge topic that I really can’t get into without writing an opus. Properly prioritizing things is one of the most important skills that a company and its staff should have.

One of the main factors in prioritizing our projects is how long they will take to print and ship. Currently most of our color books are printed overseas, and so they take extra time to ship across the ocean by boat, and then by truck or train to our warehouse. Books printed domestically [or in Canada, which is where most of our B&W books are printed] don’t have that huge boat trip. So, aside from generally taking longer to produce on our end [art, graphic design, etc], color books have to be more tightly scheduled in order for us to hit release dates. It’s also advantageous for us to print and ship multiple titles at once overseas, so we try to send a couple color books to press at the same time [as we'll be doing soon with BattleTech's Strategic Operations and CthulhuTech's Dark Passions].

The other major factor is making sure that other staff and freelancers aren’t spinning their wheels waiting for someone else’s input. If I have two pieces of work on my desk, each of them that will take one day, and Peter is waiting for me to finish one of those pieces of work before he can continue working on the book, I’ll generally prioritize that first, so his workflow doesn’t get interrupted. Also: it’s probably better for my mental state if I know that he’s not waiting around on me. There’s something to be said for clearing small “unimportant” tasks off your plate, not because they’re the most important thing to get finished, but simply so you don’t dwell on them. I’d rather worry about 1 important thing than 5 relatively unimportant things!

There are a ton of other factors in priorities: money and cash flow, reprint status [we recently had several Shadowrun books sell out, and so my attention immediately had to go to integrating corrections and getting them back to the printer], mental health [some days a particular workplace problem bothers me greatly, so I fix it, some days I can't wait to work on a certain game, so I do so.], etc.

There’s no magic formula for priorities, although we do have formulas that determine, for example, if we want a book in stores on July 1st, we have to have it at press on a certain date, layout started a number of weeks before press, text edited before layout starts, etc. We always start at the release date and work backwards — there’s no other way to sanely do things.

This entry was posted by admin, on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 18:58:50 and is filed under General.