StevyGee’s Blog

With most of class 2 over for me, I look back on 8 weeks of very inte­res­ting lec­tures and live Q&As… and many late assignments.

Things haven’t been going well in terms of time-management. It’s an old hat for me and still a major chal­lenge. When I star­ted Ani­ma­ti­onMen­tor, I couldn’t ima­gine that I would pro­cras­ti­nate. After all, I love to ani­mate! But it still hap­pened week after week. There were many Sun­days where I rea­li­zed I had to rush the assi­gn­ment again. Every time I noti­ced how much more time I wan­ted to put into my work, with the 9PM dead­line quickly approa­ching. When the dead­line pas­sed, most of my moti­va­tion was gone. It’s very hard to keep working on some­thing that alre­ady nee­ded to be finis­hed. Once, I sub­mit­ted an assi­gn­ment on Thurs­day the next week. Last week, it was as late as the next Sun­day, where ano­ther assi­gn­ment was due!

It wasn’t the first time I deci­ded that things nee­ded to change. But it was a new extreme situa­tion, where I sub­mit­ted an assi­gn­ment 7 days late and ente­red the next week with ano­ther late assi­gn­ment plus the next one for that week. So I kept working hard on Mon­day and Tues­day and finis­hed my blo­cking from the pre­vious week. I ana­ly­zed my video refe­rence and spent a lot of time on my poses. I had to force mys­elf to do it, but it paid off: I got a B– on the assi­gn­ment, which would’ve been an A– if it hadn’t been late. An A– is the best grade I got in all of class 1 & 2.

Two things I found out hel­ped: Momen­tum and sepa­ra­ting work from fun. With momen­tum I sim­ply mean that if you spend a day not working, it’s har­der to begin again the next day. Sprea­ding the work across all days of the week mini­mi­zes the risk of not star­ting to work again until it’s too late. Of course it is nice to have a wee­kend with lots of free time, but the tra­di­tio­nal wee­kend doesn’t exist with a 9PM dead­line on Sun­day any­way. For me it’s bet­ter to just do a little less work one or two days a week, but never stop­ping. So star­ting this week, I’m try­ing to keep the momentum.

How to sepa­rate work from fun? I would be lying if I’d say that I don’t spend a big part of my free time at my desk­top com­pu­ter, be it brow­sing the web, working on hobby pro­jects or play­ing games. The trou­ble is, I used to do my Ani­ma­ti­onMen­tor assi­gn­ments on the same machine, sit­ting at the same desk. The line bet­ween work and fun often blur­red into a grey mess, because it’s so easy to switch. Ever since my internship I am con­vin­ced that having a work place that sepe­ra­ted by some dis­tance from home is key to being pro­duc­tive. So I deci­ded to buy a lap­top that is just for work and that I can take any­where but to my room. The results are both incredi­ble and instan­te­nous: Sud­denly I could ani­mate for hours at a stretch, wit­hout dis­trac­tions or having to resist the temp­ta­tion of going online.

So this is the Ani­ma­ti­onMen­tor pro­gram for­cing me to deal with my evil pro­cras­ti­na­tion hab­its, one of the big­gest chal­len­ges I’ve yet had to face. Having a dead­line every week with ever­yone in the pro­gram see­ing when you sub­mit, makes a fai­ling to sub­mit on time very obvious. Repea­ting my mis­take of star­ting way to late again and again made me rea­lize that I still had a long way to go. Finally I’m star­ting to break this vicious cir­cle. I did it mys­elf, which is what I wan­ted but not neces­sa­rily the best way to do it. I could’ve asked for help in the AM com­mu­nity, be more proac­tive or at least not block all com­mu­ni­ca­tion… This blog post should help, hence the title. Any­way, yes­ter­day I star­ted to post com­ments again and was a fun thing to do!

So here I leave you with the assi­gn­ment I sub­mit­ted almost two days ago. More stuff from class 2 is on my YouTube channel.

Oh and this video hel­ped, too