When the projects start pouring in: how to manage workflow
Sylvan
Posts: 2,718
Projects of various size are starting to happen, which is rather awesome, but it comes with some challenges as well.
I am wondering how other people manage their workflow at home, once the hobby starts getting more serious.
And with serious I mean: making money of sales, deadlines and working in a home environment.
Do you have special hours set aside?
Or do you work behind the computer in some lost late hours?
Working at home can be a pain because I feel I am interrupted constantly: the neighbour's kids at the door selling toiletpaper, inlaws calling about the operation of their pet piranha and then there's your partner who just found out we're out of toiletpaper and yells at you for not buying it from the neighbour's kids...
(You get the idea)
How do you guys and gals handle your professional workflow at home?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I work pretty nonstop. This profession is hard and requires a lot of hours to pay the bills and feed your family. I tend to sit with my headphones on all day till the kids get home from school. Both are older so they just do their homework and get on the computer for game time. I tend to not answer the phone while working hence the headphones. If its important they will call right back and then I'll answer
I have these big*ss cordless headphones and I sometimes keep them on so the neighbours won't bug me when I am out to feed the chickens or get the mail!
It's not that I am an anti-social being, it's just that I like to keep my pace up :)
May I ask how you handle different projects at the same time?
Some require more work then others and some are a bit more repetitive (not as fun if you will) then others.
I think I need to set myself some clear deadlines, for now, I feel a bit lost sometimes...
Distractions come in different ways no matter where you work...whether it's the office or home office. What you need to do is to discipline yourself and treat your home office as an office away from home. If you were in another building, would you be in a position to answer your door (home) when the neighbor's kids knock? Of course not. So you have to choose the distractions you want to entertain.
I have a 9 - 5 work away from home, but from time to time people come to my office to chit- chat. I've now resorted to closing my door, but set up a "public hours" for people to come and talk to me about work, etc.
I do set deadlines for myself. I set up a schedule per say. I'm disabled so I don't have much of a social life. Its hard for me to get around which is why I do this for a living. I tend to work 1 project at a time unless its taking more time than I expect then I will start the new project and come back to the other. I do a combination DAZ Originals and Broker packs. I tend to work on both in the same month. I'll do a DO then go to the broker pack for a few days then do another DO. Once I work on so many DO then I concentrate on the broker pack. The only time I work solid on a broker pack is for the big sales
If you are going to work at home the best suggestion is to create an office. If necessary with others living with you, set work hours and do not let them interfere with them. I don't have any close neighbors, the main gate is locked and I turn off the sound on the intercom. Send all calls to voice mail and turn the ringers off on the phones unless you are expecting a call.
Agreed. I created a little mancave in the Garage away from the usual noise so I can focus and work in peace. Also I adjusted my sleeping patterns a bit so I sleep more during the day and work at night when the world is quiet:) Its not easy working from home and many won't understand, but its up to you to enforce rules in your work area.
We have a two bedroom townhouse with a basement. All the rooms are taken so our office space is our living room. The kids are at the stage where they don't want to spend much time with the parents so it don't interfere with much. The TV is off all day until dinnertime cause we are working all day till then and sometimes after dinner
Like Frank, I set myself deadlines more than hours. I don't have an "office," but I do have my workstation - with my computer desk and the side table this laptop goes on - here in the corner of a medium-sized bedroom, and this is where I work. I am single and without children, so I can't advise you on managing that. We're in a condo so neighbors are less of a thing, too.
I would say, though, that my strategy is less "work in an uninterrupted eight-hour block" than "work in a multiple of two- to four-hour blocks." These time units are large enough to get good chunks of something done but robust enough to move around if I need to run errands, help a family member with car or computer trouble (I'm very close to and involved in the loves of my parents and sisters), take a cat to the vet, etc. Meals and exercise go in there, too (although sometimes I eat while I work).
I can't actually work efficiently in time blocks larger than eight hours because at that point my morale and energy levels drop and good artwork does not get done. I do have work days that are "longer' than that, but that's when I'm rendering, and I go away from the computer to walk, shop, etc. while the machine is working on the longer ones. So while I might occasionally have a ten to twelve hour day (normally I work around 35 hours a week not counting "prep time" brainstorming or research), that ten to twelve hours will be split up around other activities.
I sometimes work on more than one project per day, especially if one of them is very large and I know I need to get smaller things out before it's done. The time block breakup fits well with that strategy as well. Freebies, recreational rendering or non-paying projects generally get pushed into free time.
Stock up on TP and any other essentials ... turn off the phone ... put a sign on door "do NOT knock on door" ...
Some 'chore items' are easy enough to mull through while waiting for the DAZ clock to tick away ...
Others are best done in whichever hours are one's best productive time ...
Take frequent breaks from the computer [this is for your eyes] ... 10-15 minutes every hour. Call whoever back.
For the truly mundane tasks [like uvmapping in Hexagon] ... get a good bowl of popcorn :-)
I've tried to get people around me interested in what I'm doing ... hehehe ... but you know ... they soon figure out when it is a very good time to leave me alone [like when I'm uvmapping in Hexagon] :-)
Work "for yourself". You cannot please everybody and will go nuts trying to.
Make sure you get enough sleep no matter what somebody's deadlines are. Some can work on 4 hours, 7 is usually better.
And DO set aside "time for family and friends" ... those are the precious gifts in life no money can buy.
I mainly work at home but I do have to put in an appearance in-house if the client demands or there is some other folderol going on that the boys want everyone in attendance. Time sheets and what not have to be filed since many parts of the job are billed hourly. Clients seem to love the stupid things.
With a bad back I have to get up and stretch every 30-40 minutes. I check the forums in between those times.
I live with and take care of my elderly parents and a 22 year old son so it is a rare day when I actually get much done during daylight hours. Most of that ends up going to being interrupted and household what not. It sounds very nice to tell people I have "office hours" or can't be interrupted but the reality is that 80's year old parents are very unlikely to pay any attention to that at all so I've learned to be flexible and not freak out. By 7 or 8pm the house is mostly quit and I can work in earnest. If I am on a "roll" I often work till 4am. It is very rare that I take a whole day off from work related things. Most work weeks are 7 days but that helps me keep a regular scheduled. I have an office space but I keep a tv in it because if it is too quiet which I suspect puts me outside the norm.
I can't have it too quiet either! I usually have headphones on unless everyone else is gone to work/shopping/errands (often true during the afternoon) but I'm usually listening to a film playing on Netflix or Club MST3K or the like while I work. Sometimes it's music, but more often it's movies or video film reviews. I need to be able to multitask between Blender/GIMP/DS4.6 and Forum/Movie/Deviantart to do my best work.
And if we're going to talk about ideal work conditions, I often have a cat either on my lap or next to my laptop with her chin on the edge of it, but Estroyer already knows if pets are part of his workflow. :D
I was going to leave the cats out of it... But most of the PA's I know have at least one cat so they may be an important part of the workflow.
I hobby at this at night, I force myself not to sleep as much as I want. On weekends I get up extra early, I have an 8 to 5 so I'm not around during the day.I have a spare room with my workstation and a bunch of guitars because sometime with 3D waiting is involved and it breaks up watching a status bar and feeling like I can't work on something else while I wait, but I can't listen to music when I work, I get distracted to easily. I usually have Studio, Blender and Photoshop up at any given moment and I moved all my game to xbox and leave it out of reach or I'd be playing something and not working on anything.
Most of my final renderings are done in LuxRender and the option to queue lets me set up 2 or more projects and let them calculate while I'm getting on with my other responsibilities and come back and check on everything later, so while LuxRender renders can take considerably more time it's become a time saver in it's own way.
It takes a long time to train people you know that even though you are home all day...it doesnt mean you are not at work, and that they should not interrupt you.
I had to be downright rude to a few people before they got it through their head.
But self employment takes alot of time....we generally have our computers on at least 12 hours a day (usually longer), and spend whenever we can "at work".
:lol:
I have a cat and a dog. Maybe we artists like companions that don't really talk to us!
When it comes to the freelancer work flow, it's going to be different for everybody. I find I do my best work when the rest of the house is asleep. It's not unusual for me to wake up in the middle of the night, anywhere between 1 and 4 am and just go to work. I'll sit at the keyboard anywhere between six and eight hours. Fortunately, my kids're all big and don't require a lot of attention in the morning. So most days, by 9 am I've already done five hours of uninterrupted work. After the spouse is off to work I might go back to work or have a bite to eat. That decision's based on whether I've done enough for the day. If I don't get a bite, I work a few more hours. I watch a little tube. Okay, a lot of tube. Somewhere around 5 or 7 pm, I might write another two or three hours. Anywhere between nine and midnight, I call it quits. I'm finding in my old age it's getting harder to work late into the night. Especially when its nonfiction which doesn't really spark my ignition. When I'm doing fiction I can write a lot later because I enjoy it. I've just been commissioned to ghostwrite some erotica and I can do that in my sleep so that's almost easy money. I worked the other day on a piece about business degrees and it took me almost two days.
You're really going to have to figure out what's the best schedule for you and stick with it. But remember you're not a machine. Make room for some relaxation. I try to get a walk in every day and I try to do some exercises every couple of hours. Even if it's only for a few minutes. It helps keep the mind clear and the muscles from going stagnate after laying around for hours. (I do a lot of work in bed.)
kmw
Thanks for giving me a peek in your work and lives.
In the past I somehow found it more easy to plan my days with my non digital work.
But having a busy family with kids AND TWO FAT CATS might also add to the challenge indeed lol
We have a 6 month old kitten who we named keyboard-cat.
I am sure that doesn't need a lot of explanation.
I do remember having some discussion in the past with my spouse when we just had the baby and we both worked part-time.
Whenever I was working on a painting or drawing, I kept beeing interrupted.
Got me mad at some point, as if my work and the money I made wasn't been taken seriously.
We made scedules and I told him to pretend I wasn't there at my working hours at home.
Voicemail, duh, I somehow always forget its existence!
Sometimes it's in the little things...
I sit behind a large desk that I designed myself so I made sure all my pc clutter would fit.
It is located in the living because it is rather big with lots of light but the downside is that there is where all the action takes place as well.
Me thinks I am going to staple some note with "be gone or experience the wrath of keyboard-cat" on the side of my desk.
Because, if I move, he needs to move as well (he crawls behind my sweater and yes we are still talking about the cat...)
He gets even more grumpy then I do when interrupted XD