Sunday Mailbag- Professional and Personal Lives?

Q: How do you separate your personal life and family problems that interfere with your professional artistic life, and may affect deadlines or completing a job or project?

A: Considering what my family just went through last month with my daughter Gabrielle‘s serious health crisis, this is a timely question. The bottom line is, you don’t. You manage problems according to their level of seriousness.

I don’t care what kind of job you have, everyone has life complications that pop up and get in the way of getting things done. I think this is especially true if you are self-employed, because you don’t have an employer that can have other employees cover your shifts or do your job if you have some issues at home that are becoming a problem and you need some time off, and you don’t have “Sick Days” or “Personal Days” as part of your employment arrangement that you can take when needed. For a freelancer, your jobs are due when they are due. There is no one who can fill in for you.

That said, I think you have to place “personal life and problems” into two categories: the “typical” and the “catastrophic”.

Typical personal life issues are just the daily stuff that happens and distracts you or suddenly calls on needing some of your time to deal with. Everyone has these issues, although they seem to come in clumps rather than being nicely spaced out, and always seem to come at a time when they are least welcome. These are just a part of life, and you need to work around them. At bottom, what all these issues really call for is your time, so you have to make time to do them and your work. These daily things should not become excuses for not getting your work done. If that’s what they have become, step back and take a good look at how you manage your time. Eliminate distractions that are low-priority, etc. You can’t ignore the home/family/life issues that need your attention, but some are more urgent than others. Prioritize.

The “catastrophic” category is another story. These are not leaky faucets or twelve inches of snow on the driveway that needs shoveling. They are life events that stop your world… a death in the family, serious illness, accident, acts of nature. etc. Family comes first, and the consequences are whatever they are. When something like that happens most clients are very understanding and go out of their way to help you. I got seriously behind when The Lovely Anna rushed down to Orlando to be with our daughter during her 8 days stay in the ICU, and I stayed home to care for our autistic daughter. It wasn’t just that I had very little time to work in the studio, I was also very worried about our daughter and had a hard time focusing on anything else. The crew at MAD pushed my deadline to the absolute brink, and I delivered the last few pages of a seven page movie parody on the DAY THE ISSUE WHEN TO PRESS. This caused them not just a lot of stress but overtime work to do the production on these late pages at the last minute. They were great about it and more concerned about my daughter than they were the deadline. Another client I was doing a cover illustration for pushed my deadline back over two weeks to accommodate me. I go that and another job done but I am still not caught up. I have another deadline tomorrow that I got some extra time on, and I still owe a pinup illustration to a friend for a Kickstarter project that I will get to next week. It’s funny that these kinds of disasters seem to happen in bunches. I was planning on working all day on July 4th to help get caught up, but we ended up going downstairs that morning to find 4 inches of standing water in part of our basement (sump pump failure) so a good part of that day was suddenly taken up dealing with that. It never ends.

My main point here is there are personal life issues and problems that really are serious and that you cannot avoid interfering with your professional life, and then there are ones that don’t have to interfere with your work unless you let them. The difference is pretty obvious when you step back and look at it. Don’t let the latter type derail you.

Thanks to Raymond T. Nigba for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!