How to balance a lot of major projects (AKA how to do everything you want)

Careers, Journalism, Writing

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I have a lot on my plate right now, as I’m fond of blogging this 2016. “So busy!” about half of my Otaku Links posts seem to have begun. I’m a journalist at Forbes, a reviewer at Anime News Network, an affiliate blogger at Gunpla 101 and at least three other sites, a freelance web designer for practically anyone who will have me, and now a WordPress developer for a DC think tank. All that’s on top of life things, like taking Japanese language classes, shopping around my latest book idea to publishers, and occasionally doing the laundry.

It’s a far cry from the way my husband makes money, as we realize anew every year around tax time, when he collects his single W2 from a job he’s worked for five years and counting, and I juggle a pile of 1099-MISC files from ten or more companies. And while my income is a lot more variable, we often end up bringing comparable amounts to the table. But while I work seven days a week for it, his workday almost always ends at 5 PM.

It works for him (and for many other people!) but, to me, full time employment doesn’t equal security—it means somebody else is calling the shots in my career. So for the last five years, I’ve cobbled together my living out of a lot of different things. You could say I have trust issues, but the bottom line is this: I am not one to put all my eggs in one basket.  I don’t expect one employer, or one project, to keep me afloat for life, even if business is good right now.

So instead of one job, I think of my career as a rotation of long-term projects. If one falls through, I still have all the others. That’s why I do it; now I want to tell you how.

Look at the big picture

From middle school until graduate school, I used a weekly planner to stay organized. It was hard enough getting through one week; I didn’t need or want to look further ahead.

Now, that’s all I do. Planning starts on December 31, when I set major goals for the year ahead. I usually set twelve and dedicate each month to one project. For example, January was dedicated to writing my new affiliate guide, this month I’m building a PHP/MySQL database site, and next month is scheduled as a “catch-up” for ongoing projects before I go to Japan.

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My planner structure also matches this twelve-month visualization. I now use monthly planners so I can see how the month’s goal is coming together amid all the chaos. I got my current planner at Muji Times Square for $1.50 and it’s a bargain. This January 2016 layout leaves a lot to be desired; like I ought to have written down my dedicated affiliate guide writing days, but instead I just made room for it in the gaps. I like to think I’ve improved since then.

Work in bite-sized bits

Of course, looking at life 30 days at a time can be pretty overwhelming. That’s why I’ve had to make peace with the idea that I can only do a little at a time. I can’t fill my Forbes monthly quota today, but I can write just one article. I can’t write an entire book this evening, but I can write an entire outline and get started on Chapter One.

This has been harder than you’d think. I used to be all about the checklist. A day where I can’t check off a project felt like a day in stagnation. I still have checklists now, but they consist of smaller bits of larger projects. I use Evernote’s checklist feature to make a note for each of my ongoing projects that consists of a checklist of smaller tasks. Then, every evening when I am creating a to-do list for the following day, I put those tasks on my master checklist for every day.

I truly believe this shift in my thinking about accomplishments is what has allowed me to write books. I used to be too overwhelmed by the idea of a writing project I couldn’t finish in one day. But by thinking of it as a group of much smaller writing projects made it possible.

Know your limits

I want this to be a guide about how you can do every single thing you’ve ever aspired to. But there’s a caveat—you can’t do it all at one time. You need to set a realistic schedule.

When you work seven days a week, burnout can be a risk. I keep it at bay by scheduling breaks as seriously as I schedule tasks. I’m certain I come across as pretty lazy, because sometimes you can find me watching anime on a Wednesday morning. Being able to occasionally goof off on weekdays is one of the freedoms of setting my own schedule, and taking full advantage of that reminds me that I’m not an overworked masochist. I could get more done if I took fewer breaks, but I’ve been there and I’ve seen the raw, red-eyed extent of that burnout.

Life is supposed to be enjoyable, and I don’t want to get my only enjoyment through the rush of finishing a major project. I don’t want to work all the time, and neither do you.

Reassess monthly

Sometimes the projects I set for myself in December don’t resonate anymore in September. That’s OK. It’s all part of my end-of-the-month reassessment, where I ask myself, “Are these still the projects I want to be spending my energy on?” That’s when I weigh the sacrifice each of my projects require over the amount of value they bring to my career.

Take my WordPress development job. I know if I got rid of it I could free up my schedule to create two or even three new projects per month. But I also have to consider which projects are bringing in the most value for me, in this case, in the form of regular income and building significantly on my coding skills. In exchange for that value, it’s a job that takes up a chunk of my time and no small amount of mental energy. Right now, it’s totally worth it. A year from now, who knows? I consider everything temporary, so it can wait for my next reassessment.

The most important thing is that I never want to feel like I’m indebted to a project because the boss is nice, or more than 75% of my income comes from there (I don’t want to be in that situation, period). I always want to look at projects as worth my time while they provide value to me in the form of money or exposure or experience, and say goodbye when they don’t.

A lot of my thinking on this modular style of career comes from Jen Dziura of Get Bullish (whom you may remember as the publisher of my affiliate linking guide) and while her advice has a feminist bent, I assure you it’s for everyone who has a job.

Would you call your career a modular one or a 9-to-5? If you’re interested in making money off of your geeky interests, do you see that as a side hustle or an eventual full-time gig?

Otaku Links: Miracle La!

Otaku Links

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  • Fushigi Yuugi is now streaming on Crunchyroll in its entirety. This is one of the first anime I ever heard about, though in the Before Times I couldn’t get my hands on more than a couple episodes (on VHS!). Now that there are three major anime streaming services between Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Daisuki, I think collecting the rights to classic titles is a great differentiating move.
  • Looking for more old anime? The Anime Nostalgia Tumblr has a fairly comprehensive guide to watching streaming anime 12 years or older. Usually it’s hard enough keeping up with current good anime, but this Winter 2016 has been a little blah for me and perfect for digging into the archives.
  • Here’s an idea, how about we all stop trashing convention hotels? While stuff like this has happened for as long as I have been going to cons, our bad behavior is only going to get more visible as our fandom grows and grows. It would suck if hotels and convention centers stopped putting up with it.
  • Speaking of games, Jet Set Radio is free on Steam right now. No time to play? Do what I do and tune in to JetSetRadio.live to make work a little more awesome.
  • Why do people love anime? Like, as opposed to other kinds of media? Justin Stroman interviewed me and a bunch of other professional fans, about why it resonates so intensely.

Scan from Fushigi Yuugi manga

The Seven Year Itch

Fandom

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This weekend would have been my seventh Katsucon. If I had gone.

In the past six years, I haven’t missed it. Held first in my neighborhood and later a modest ten-minute drive away, it’s far and beyond my closest convention. Despite the lines and chaos, I always found time for it between my senior year of college, grad school, and beyond. My first Katsucon was a journalism class project in college. My second Katsucon, I embedded in the maid cafe to record participants and guests. Since then nothing has kept me away, from a blizzard that threatened to shut it down to breaking my foot the day right before and attending anyway, in a wheelchair, so I could report on an Artist Alley scandal. Between all that, I treated the show as a friend reunion, meeting up with people I rarely saw the rest of the year.

Over the years, however, my friends began to lose interest. Katsucon wasn’t about piling into a hotel room and catching glimpses of each other between our seven diverging schedules. At first it felt fancy and grown-up for John and I to get a hotel room all to ourselves and skip the gobbled fast food meals in favor of sit-down dinners. But as the novelty wore off, we began wondering if this was how we wanted to keep spending our hard-earned vacation money. In 2015, John and I spent a good $500 at Katsucon (you can thank a Perfect Grade, the most complicated and expensive Gunpla model, for that) and decided enough was enough.

Kind of. I have been murmuring on Twitter about my intent to show up, despite not having secured a badge yet. Until I woke up on Saturday morning and just… didn’t go. I had planned to interview couples about love, and tie it into the way my husband and I have spent over five years dedicating our Valentine’s Day weekend to Katsucon. But the thought exhausted me, and not because I’m afraid of hard work. (Heck, instead of going to Katsucon, I built an entirely new affiliate site, for fun.) What tired me out was that I could already see my long day unfolding in front of me without even leaving my bed—I would brave the cold, wait in at least one long line, and spend too much money on food and in the Dealer’s Room to “reward” myself for reporting. I would spend time attempting half-hearted hellos with former friends I’ve grown apart from, none of us having enough time to give ourselves the proper reunions our friendships deserve.

In short, Katsucon had become a routine for me, and I wanted out. I probably should’ve stopped going last year. But when you want to cement yourself as a Name in the fandom, the way I wanted to be known as the Otaku Journalist, cons are the social events of the season. I had serious FOMO thinking about the opportunities and meet-ups I might miss.

And if I’m honest with myself, it goes a layer deeper than that. I’m afraid of changing.

If I stop enjoying conventions, what’s next, that I stop being a part of anime fandom? And if that happens, who have I become? You may recall me having a similar identity crisis when I took on a part-time job as a web developer, putting my Otaku Journalism to the side. When you write in the same blog for six years, you (and everyone else) see your evolution as a person right out there in the open. And my biggest fear is that I’ll become somebody so different, so unrecognizable even to me that the title “Otaku Journalist” no longer fits.

I’m already a different person than I was when I discovered Katsucon seven years ago. Deciding not to go was a matter of summoning the bravery to acknowledge that—and the will not to see it as some sort of anime fan failing. It’s about seeing Katsucon for what it is: a yearly event, not a tool I use to grasp onto my identity. Skipping a year doesn’t mean I’ve unalterably changed as a person, just that it’s not one of my priorities right now. Just like that, I was at peace instead of anxious. Saturday evening, I scrolled through my Twitter and Instagram enjoying everyone’s photos, but never once wondering if I should be there, too. And at the same time, I felt the contact high from the thrill of anime con energy, and came up with some plans for next year’s Katsucon. Panels, reporting ideas. Projects I’m ready to dive into for Katsucon 2017 now that I’ve removed all the baggage of “making an appearance.” I broke out of some kind of mental prison in which Katsucon was something mandatory for me—and now I can’t wait to go back.

If you went to Katsucon, I’m sure you had a wonderful time (despite that electrical fire snafu). It’s one of my favorites for a reason. I hope to see you there next year.

Photo of the Gaylord National, where Katsucon is held, by David Clow

Otaku Links: Japanic and Nihorror

Otaku Links

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  • With my Japan trip about a month away it’s time to Japanic! It’s my first time traveling internationally in eight years and I’m rusty. But this packing list and this one are two of the best I’ve found so far and are giving me a little bit of confidence that I can be ready.
  • The creators of Psycho-Pass teamed up with a consumer electronics company to make a super realistic transforming Dominator. Watch the demo and you tell me if you think it’s worth $700.
  • First Gurren Lagann, then Kill la Kill, and now… Space Patrol Luluco? Our first look at the surprisingly simple and cute new anime from Studio Trigger. HT Zoe!
  • When a Japanese TV personality had an affair with a married musician, he went on with his successful career while she took all the blame and saw her career destroyed. And this is 2016. Looks like it’s not only idols who have to keep spotless personas in order to find professional success.
  • While we’re on the subject of me, a reader asked me for an email script for reaching out to an anime scholar he wanted to interview, and while I was writing my suggestion I thought, wait, haven’t I done this before? So I halved the price of Niche Journalism Workbook to $5.
  • And finally, this vaguely accurate History of Japan video is the seapunk primer I never knew I wanted.

Photo by Osamu Kaneko

5 signs getting paid to watch anime isn’t for you

Uncategorized

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It’s been a busy week here in Laurenland. There’s the affiliate guide I just finished plus some new client work on top of my usual responsibilities, like my web developer job, writing for Forbes, studying Japanese, and doing my weekly streaming reviews. And even that’s on top of stuff everyone has to do, like laundry and cooking dinner and commuting.

In the midst of planning how I’d getting it all done, I got an email from Zac at Anime News Network asking if I could review the new Zeta Gundam Blu-ray release. We try to review shows with a very quick turnaround to make things timely for readers, so I knew this meant that I’d be aiming to, on top of everything else, watch 2 hours of Zeta every day.

“Sure!” I emailed back without a second thought.

Now, whether you think my week was hell or awesome says a lot about you. For many people, myself included, getting paid to watch anime is a dream come true. But the funny thing about dreams is that they never quite match up to the reality of the situation. No job is fun 100% of the time, and that means there are some un-fun parts of watching anime for a living, too.

I’ve blogged a lot about how to get paid to watch anime, but never why or why not to do it. Here’s a list of reasons that you might not want to pursue this line of work:

1) You don’t want to marathon shows at a moment’s notice.

Sites that publish anime reviews, like Anime News Network, have a duty to readers to deliver reviews in a timely fashion. That means the onus is on reviewers to watch anime in a timely fashion, too. You can’t watch something at a leisurely pace or “only when you have time.” And because anime releases in the West depend on translations and a whole slew of other contingencies, it’s not like reviewers can often get “early” review copies.

What’s more, we don’t have total control over when releases come out. I had Zeta on my calendar as releasing in March, but things went well and RightStuf released it early. That means my review needed to come out now—today, in fact! If that kind of schedule would simply not fit with your life, you’re going to be miserable reviewing anime for a living.

2) You only want to watch anime you personally enjoy.

Let’s transition to my Anime News Network Weekly Streaming Reviews. We review any show that readers like better than Naruto (really) and sometimes that’s not a very high bar. Take the winter season, which has been notably lackluster for good anime shows.

As a result, I’m reviewing one show I adore, another show that’s just so-so, and a third show that I’m convinced is pretty much garbage. Will I be watching all three of them to the end regardless? You bet! You can’t quit in the middle of a weekly streaming review. And sometimes shows can get a lot better (or worse) over time. And by the way, I almost always choose which anime I want to review, and sometimes, with just one episode as a preview, I choose poorly, (looking at you, Attack on Titan: Junior High). If I weren’t a reviewer I could see the error of my ways and drop a show, but I never drop a show I’m reviewing.

Could you spend your time watching shows you’re just not that into, and dedicate an hour weekly to writing 500 words on each of them anyway? If the answer is no, this isn’t for you.

3) You don’t like writing, or you’re not a fast writer.

Now about those 500 words. That’s my minimum for a weekly streaming review (for a show review it’s 1,000). Though I can get deadline extensions if I need them, generally I write those reviews three times a week whether I feel like it or not. There’s no time to wait for my muse to appear when I need to have a review out within 24 hours of the show airing.

When I was younger I used to be a slower writer and a bit of a perfectionist. But my former job with the Daily Dot, writing up to five posts a day, cured me of that. Writing for a living, whether about anime or otherwise, means treating the writing process as a job instead of an art. If that would ruin writing for you, you’re not going to have a good time.

4) You’re allergic to keeping a schedule.

Writing weekly reviews on a show means staying committed to that show’s schedule, whether it’s convenient for you or not. I’m currently reviewing Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans, which comes out on Saturday in Japan—and 4 AM Sunday my time. That means that by the time I wake up on Sunday, I’m already at a time disadvantage for getting my review done. And I have to do this every single Sunday while Orphans continues to air.

How does working on the weekend sound to you, even if it’s for anime reviewing? What about altering your schedule for twelve to 24 weeks at a time to do that work? If that sounds impossible, or simply unsustainable, this work might not be a good fit for you.

5) You wouldn’t be able to enjoy your hobby as your job.

I recently tweeted, “I have monetized everything I enjoy and now I don’t know how to relax.” What was going through my mind was that, if I’m going to watch anime, I really ought to review it; if I’m going to build Gunpla, I might as well document it for Gunpla 101; same goes with lighting a candle; and with writing for fun; or dabbling with web design. This was a joke tweet, because I’m a bit of a workaholic and mixing business and pleasure works for me. But I realize that for other people, it could be suffocating. Think carefully about whether knowing that there’s anime you are now obligated to watch would totally ruin it as a hobby for you.

If these five reasons apply to you, that’s not a judgement against you. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to watch anime for fun, end of story. It’s just best to figure it out now before you find yourself in an unenjoyable situation.

After reading this, do you still think getting paid to watch anime would be fun for you?

Photo via elderleaf