A lot of people have passion for their own work and the desire to create something wonderful. The dream of really really take ownership of their work. And yet, more often than not, those people achieve much more when working for someone else than they do on their own projects. They might tinker away at their projects once a month or so. Or just wish that’s what they were doing and then feel bad that they haven’t actually achieved anything. Sound familiar?

So how do you focus yourself on your own work when you get a bit of time? For me, there are several ways of doing it but what they really come down to is replicating the pressure of having a job. When you’re an employee, usually someone tells you what they need and when they need it. And once you have a goal and a deadline, you have a target and you get to work and great things happen.

When you have your own projects, you probably know your big end goal. But you may not have broken it into smaller tasks yet. And I’m willing to bet you have no deadline.

So set a deadline. Better yet, get yourself a deadline. What’s the difference? If you set a deadline, you can shift it. You get busy and so you put it off for a week. Two weeks. Months. But if you acquire some sort of external deadline, that’s likely to be fixed. An application to a funding body. A submission to the Cartoon Forum. A trip to a conference or a market. Set up a meeting for that market with someone important and then put that date in your calendar. Congratulations – you just got yourself a deadline.

Now put that in whatever diary you use to keep track of what you’re doing, whether it’s your phone calendar or a series of scrappy post-its stuck to your computer. Break down what you need to do into smaller goals and create smaller step deadlines between now and your fixed deadline. Never lose the pressure of that big deadline. In fact, if it doesn’t feel pressured enough, get more deadlines to meet. Become a gatherer of deadlines.

Then meet every one of them. Before long, your project will have turned from an idea to a developed pitch concept and, if you keep at it, hopefully much more than that.

Every moment is precious. We only get a certain number of them. In childhood, I think they are even more precious because they become part of who you grow up to be. Everything can influence us one way or another and it can be so hard to predict what experiences will impact us in what ways.

So imagine you can sit a kid down for eleven minutes of their life. Or seven minutes. Or maybe even just five. And you can tell them anything you want. They might not remember it but, at that moment, you have an opportunity to tell them something. You could make them laugh, tell jokes and brighten up their day. You could tell them something you wish you had known at that age, something that might make being a kid that much easier. A trick to tying shoelaces, perhaps. Or you could tell them something that might help them grow up to be a better adult. Something that, if they take it to heart, might help other kids.

When you make a show or write an episode or make an app, you get to do just that. You get to communicate with children. You have their attention and you can tell them something. It doesn’t have to be something important but it can be.

You get to a little moment of their life. Use it well.

Scripting comes with struggles. I find one of the most common struggles is marrying what you want with what would actually happen. You might need a character to go somewhere to serve the story but there is no way that the character would ever go there. You want a core aim for your B-plot character but they keep getting swept up in the A plot and won’t focus on anything else. You want a theme of acceptance but your characters require such a turnaround to get there that it just isn’t plausible.

Those struggles happen all the time. If you’re having a hard time with one of them, you’ll hear ‘it feels contrived’. And it IS contrived. It is all contrived. But if you’re crafting a story, it is your job to make it feel like it isn’t.

This post isn’t about that struggle. It is about what happens when you beat it. When you win.

You’ll get a flash of inspiration. Suddenly the dots will connect. You have a way of making your character do exactly what you want in a natural, believable way. Or you rephrase a goal or theme and everything falls into place. Those are wonderful moments.

Here’s the tip: make absolutely certain that your realisation, that clarity, actually makes it into your story. It is no good if just you know why it all makes sense. It has to be there in the story, in the script or in the boards. That’s where it counts.

It sounds obvious, right? And yet is all too easy to have the pieces fit for you and actually miss that you have to make them all fit for everyone else too. You won’t be around to explain it to the audience. So when you’ve overcome a story struggle, a character challenge, a theme obstacle, get it into the script in the clearest way possible. Nobody should see how you struggled with that. If they do, you still have work to do.

Way, way back when we made Fluffy Gardens, we started with a pilot episode. After a significant development period and with a full crew, it took us around 4 weeks, possibly a little more. That was with simple, pretty crude, yet charming animation. A higher level of polish and it would have taken us far longer. For just 7 minutes of screen time. And that’s just the animation itself.

To make 40 episodes (the length of our first series) at that rate would take over three years. But of course it didn’t. With the same crew, we were getting episodes out in just 4 days by the end of the series and looking better than the pilot did.

4 weeks to 4 days.

That’s some difference. That comes with familiarity, knowing the methods, the characters, building up libraries. We got better and we got faster. And that’s entirely normal. That is why it is difficult to break down a series schedule to an exact per episode time period. You estimate it based on an average, knowing the early episodes will take an age and the final episodes will be quick.

The real hard work is done up front. Those early episodes need the focus. They need the scrutiny. They need questions: are we happy with this? Are we doing it the right way? And they need the time. That will pay off hugely down the line.

Thing is, it is true for more than just animation production. Having just one writer or two on a whole show, for example, means they get to know it and they put in that work in finding what it is and, soon, they are doing it better and faster. Your composer will learn new things in those early episodes that they will apply as they go on. Everyone in the process will learn some new tricks in those early days or weeks.

So what’s the point here? It’s this: don’t panic when that early work seems to take an age. It’s normal. That’s going to pay off. Just make sure you start to see an increase in momentum as you continue.