Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is time management. I had to learn how to manage mine carefully when I was looking for a new job. Liquid Development needed me back in production to help meet milestones on a project, so they took marketing away from me permanently, and that was something I wouldn’t do. I was forced into working on art from 9 to 6, then coming home and working on art tests from 6 to 3am. That got me thinking, what can I do to manage my time more efficiently?

The first place to start was to find out what I was spending most of my time on at work. My morning routine is usually to come in at 9, fire up ICQ (for friends), Yahoo (for work) and MSN (for Dea). Then I’ll drink my coffee and browse the news for about 15 to 30 minutes, then begin working. I began paying attention to every distraction around me and was stunned to realize how much time was spent on non-work.

These are the biggest culprits I’ve found:

1. IM applications. I get messages from people constantly and that distracts me from my work. And it’s SO easy to think “Hey, I wonder how X is doing” and just send him a message.
2. Web browsing. I use Opera, and I can have as many windows open at once as I want without cluttering the taskbar. Nice feature, but makes it way too easy to get distracted browsing something.
3. Music. Fiddling with my playlist or trying to find the right album to play gets in the way.

The worst part of these distractions is that they not only occupy my attention, they occupy my mind and kick me out of the flow of working. Since I needed to reach a new level of productivity so I could focus on each task one by one and bust it all out like a machine. The more I considered it the more I realized that the tasks I had before me were almost entirely mechanical work. I was spending most of my time texturing characters, and I’ve reached the point where that’s a simple mechanical process. There are small elements of design in it, but almost without exception it’s something I can look at, know what I need to do to do it and just do it. Fatigue isn’t a factor.

So I worked up a plan to solve all these time management problems and worked up a few other little schemes to increase my productivity. This is what I came up with:

1. Close all Instant Messaging apps while I work. There’s no reason not to. I know it’s a distraction and I get amazing amounts of work done simply from doing this.
2. Close email apps and web browser. These are undeniably distracting, and made a huge difference in my output.
3. Turn off music and listen to audio books. I do like music, and it helps me concentrate sometimes, but playlist shuffling and switching songs doesn’t occupy my brain like it should and my mind wanders and I become tempted to use IM or web browse. It ties into the mechanical process I mentioned earlier… my mind doesn’t need to be completely focused on my task because I know instinctively what needs to be done and how. So a large part of my mind is left dormant. If I put on an audio book, that part of my mind is fully occupied and I can work freely and without distraction, and literally lose myself in my work. It also removes the need for playlist shuffling. This is the biggest productivity boost I’ve found.
4. Turn the TV off if I’m at home. I’m in a 1bed apartment now, and I have a TV four feet on my right. Dea almost always has it on and I fucking hate it because it’s so distracting. If I can help it, I tell her to listen to music instead of TV and I turn it off and can focus.
5. Use a stopwatch to time my tasks. This not only helps me achieve better productivity but it’s also a way to measure my progress. Since the tasks I have are mechanical processes, the variables of time are minimized and I can quickly and reliably estimate how long X or Y will take. It’s extremely interesting to measure my performance at a certain task, both for comparing my time to previous tasks and for seeing how accurate my internal sense of time is. I’ve begun pondering how far I can take this concept, and try and set performance records for myself like athletes do.
6. Drink coffee, avoid alcohol. I get a wicked head-buzz from coffee that makes me feel like I can do anything and conquer the world. I do my best reading and thinking when I’m buzzed. Conversely, alcohol destroys that part of my brain, and even if I have a single drink at 7pm one night, sometimes my concentration is shot for half the day the next day. It’s sad, but I know that’s the cause now, so I can act accordingly.

I’ve done all these things and watched my productivity increase dramatically. When I’m in that flow I can bust out a full character every two days, which feels pretty awesome. I also had some other ideas that I’m going to experiment with when I start at Ready At Dawn. It’s near-Draconian discipline, I know, but since I’m starting fresh in a new environment, why not experiment and see what works?

1. Only ONE Instant Messaging client, for work colleagues only. Not even Dea gets this one. I know the people I’m working with will be busting ass as hard as I am and won’t bother me with trivial BS.
2. Only ONE email account, for work mail only. I won’t have my GMail tray notification open, which is another distraction.
3. No web browser bookmarks. I’m tempted to go through the full cycle, and if I keep no bookmarks at all (except for work-related bookmarks), I’m less likely to be distracted.
4. Time blocks. I’m going to try setting hourly goals for myself and push my performance forward with the stopwatch like an athlete does.
5. No disruptive music. Stuff like Mindless Self Indulgence, Slipknot, Atari Teenage Riot and GWAR really break my concentration and makes it hard to work. If I’m listening to any music I need to make it softer more concentration-conducive music like Mozart, Crystal Method or Frontline Assembly.

I’m wondering how much of those I’ll keep doing after I start. Since I haven’t made any memory associations with RAD yet, I think if I start out feeling like it’s a place to work and NOT fuck around, I’ll be able to maintain productivity long term. It’s too easy to get distracted at Liquid Development, and I’m so used to fucking around there that it’s really hard to change those habits.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Going to read a few books on the subject and see what else I learn. In reading Sam “Wal-Mart” Walton’s quasi-autobiography, I read about an efficiency consultant that Japanese companies have utilized heavily in maintaining insane levels of structure and productivity, and I found that interesting. I’ve packed that book away and the bookmark that I wrote that consultant’s name on is inside it, but as soon as I get to CA I’m going to dig it out find out who it is and start absorbing his wisdom.

Thanks for reading!

Woo, another update. I had a comment posted in my last update from someone I didn’t even know read my blog, so, happily, I feel obliged to keep updating. :)

In less heavy and far happier news, I’ve started playing games again. For a while I was working about 16 – 20 hours a day working at Liquid and doing art tests to find a new job, and had to cut out everything that wasn’t directly productive. Now I’m relaxing again.

I picked up Burnout 3 and The Sims 2 this past couple weeks. Typically I hate racing games, but I tried Burnout 3 while I was interviewing at Ready At Dawn and was immediately hooked!

The game’s amazing on many levels. The controls are very arcadey and it’s very easy to memorize the general control philosophy so controlling cars becomes so instinctive, you forget you’re holding a controller. I fall deeply in love with games that allow this sort of freedom, because ultimately I believe a game’s interface should be so simple and easy to comprehend that it quickly transcends the need for intensive mental processing and instead becomes instinctive and reflexive.

To put it more simply, I don’t want to THINK about what I want to do. I want to know what I want to do and memorize the pattern to follow to complete it. If I see a turn coming up, I have a close enough feel for the mechanics of movement that I know exactly the right time to tap the joystick to turn and to tap the brake to drift around the corner, and quickly and unthinkingly make minute adjustments to right myself. It’d be a burden to think all that through, but the control scheme in Burnout 3 is so simple, perfect and easily predictable that it’s a breeze! An example of a terrible interface and controls would be Resident Evil Zero for the Gamecube, where I never know what direction I’ll head.

There’s more beauty to the game, however. The graphics are fantastic, naturally, but what makes me keep coming back is that every action in the game is constructive in some way. You have a set of immediate goals and a set of secondary, almost passive goals. Your immediate goals are to either crash into a crowded intersection and cause $X amount of damage, or crash 10 cars, or get a gold medal in this event. Your secondary goals are something like achieving 500 Takedowns (crashing other cars), or $10,000,000 crash damage dollars, which are small milestones that unlock new cars and tracks.

If you’re in a normal race, even if you place badly, your Takedown count or Burnout Points (style points for driving, basically) add up and unlock new vehicles, tracks and events for you. I never feel like I’m wasting my time. In other racing games, if I crash once in a race, it’s all over and I have to restart the race. Some extreme situations in Burnout CAN be that bad, but even then, if I crash in a REALLY cool way, I get bonus points for it that accumulate.

Between the unlockables, great graphics, fantastic gameplay and control scheme, this is a really fantastic game. I’ve even gotten Dea into it, which is pretty cool.

Sims 2 I haven’t played much of, but I’m impressed with all the improvements so far. Most of the bullshit micromanagement that made the first Sims frustrating is gone, and it’s been replaced with FUN. More soon on that.

HEY, speaking of something completely unrelated, I’d like to extend an enthusiastic “fuck you” to all apartment complexes in Orange County. You are all stupid for not allowing more than two pets, regardless of species. I can see how charging a $1000 pet deposit per FISH is necessary. Guppies are, of course, notoriously messy creatures. I had one get out once and SHRED this sofa I had. No joke!

That’s all I’ve got for now. 12:44am. Time for another glass-o-wine, enjoying Conan O’Brien then bed and back to the grind. One more week from tomorrow is my last day at Liquid Development. Yay!

Another while with no update. Decent reason for it though. Been busy. :)

I’ve decided to leave Liquid Development. My final day is October 1. It’s definitely an amicable parting, and I gave a bit more than the standard two weeks’ notice. I decided it was time to get back to my core skills: Namely, 3D art. I’d moved into sales and marketing earlier this year and I began to miss doing what got me into the industry in the first place. Also, Portland, great as it is, never felt quite like home.

I’ve done a bit of interviewing and finally decided to take a position at Ready At Dawn Studios, which is based in Santa Ana, California. It’s a startup composed of senior developers from Blizzard and Naughty Dog that are working on an unannounced Playstation Portable title. I flew down there a couple weeks back to interview and fell in love with the studio immediately. It’s an amazingly talented and diverse group of people, the location is great, the studio environment itself is totally wicked-awesome, the game is incredible and the general atmosphere and work ethic really felt right. I knew I’d sorely regret not taking the job, so after a bit of deliberation, I accepted their offer.

My starting date there is October 13. Right now I’m in the process of packing up all my crap and moving down there. I’m having to go through a bit of hassle and heartbreak to get things ready, but fortunately, I have more than enough time to get things ready. I’m trying to sell off my weights and weight bench, a DVD rack, and my mostly non-working car that I haven’t driven for ten months. Also, tragically, I’m having to give away my beloved little baby rats because of the ridiculous costs involved in transporting them, paying pet deposits, and the fact that we couldn’t find any apartment complexes that accepted more than two pets.

The costs are astronomical… you could easily fit a single rat inside a coke bottle and have room left over, and yet, airlines require that I spend presumably hundreds of dollars getting certificates of health for all nine of them, that I spend $30 on a cat carrier for each individual rat, and then pay $375 per rat for VIP class travel through the airplane. The only alternative to VIP class is to put them in the cargo area, where half of them are quite literally guaranteed to freeze to death during the flight. And then, even if I were to find an apartment that accepted more than two pets of any type (fish included), I’d have to pay $250 to 1000 per rat as deposit. Altogether I’d spend upwards of $9,000 just to transport all my rats to California.

It was an incredibly difficult decision to make, but we’ve decided that there’s no alternative but to give them away. We have a taker for our six little girl rats, and a possible taker for our three little boys. :\ We’re going to buy a couple kittens when we get to California to hopefully ease the pain. I’m sure it will for Dea, at least.

On a happier note, we found a freaking badass apartment. Most places around Santa Ana had 500 sq ft apartments for no less than $1600 a month, which is almost three times as expensive as what we have now for 175 sq ft less. Fortunately, I have a friend in Huntington Beach who lives in a complex that offers 2bed apartments with 1125 sq ft for only $1400 a month, which is AWESOME. It’s also a five minute walk from the beach, which is pretty outstanding as I’ve never been there before. Huntington Beach is about 40 minutes south of LA, which is comfortably far away enough that I can breathe without feeling like I’m dying.

So yeah, things are going pretty well. I’ll miss the folks at Liquid Development, but I’m ready now to close that chapter of my life and begin anew in California, working in full game development again on what’s definitely the coolest project I’ve been involved in to date. I’m really happy again. :)

I don’t even know who reads this, but in any case, I’ll begin making more substantial and frequent updates from now on, now that I can break the silence. Work has been my life this past month and a half and I’ve hardly had time to breathe… and that’s nearly over.