Hello again, print enthusiasts. It’s been way too long since my last entry, and I apologize. In my own defense, let me say that I’ve been legitimately busy as hell. In addition to the 40 or so hours of pre-press I do at my day job, I’ve also been laying out all the print ads, fliers, posters and signage for a local movie theatre. I also won a poster design contest which turned out to be a lot more work (all of it fun) than I anticipated; I’ve had to convert the poster artwork into a couple of different formats to be used as newspaper ads and a two-color T-shirt.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=761299462&ref=ts
I also had to assist in the final layout/pre-flighting of a 64 page festival program guide (a once yearly volunteer gig).
http://www.comfest.com/program-guide.php
And that’s just the graphics part of my life. I also play in three different bands, some weeks as many as five, and I’m in the middle of recording an album. In short, I’ve been too damn busy to even think about this blog.
Good god, I just re-read that first paragraph and now I’m exhausted. Yeesh.
Anyway, been busy, didn’t write, please forgive me and let’s get on with things, okay?
I feel compelled to spend a little time talking about work; workflow, workload, workarounds, dirty work, and working smart vs. working hard.
Let me be clear about this: I don’t mind working. I don’t mind working forty or even fifty hours a week. But when I look back over a week’s activity and realize that I spent forty or fifty hours doing what really amounts to twenty or thirty hours worth of actual accomplishment, that’s when I get angry.
This what happens when nobody plans ahead, when nobody thinks things through to their logical conclusion, when nobody prioritizes things. Here’s a perfect example of how bad things can get when you panic over a job that’s due yesterday and rush into it with your eyes closed:
When I spend thirty minutes prepping some client’s post card artwork and get it proofed and approved, and then you tell me it’s an automated job that needs room for a barcode on the mailing panel so that I spend another thirty minutes re-jiggering the file and getting it proofed and approved again, and then you tell me that I can’t use the mailing list you gave me because it still has to be pre-sorted (rendering the merged InDesign file I just spent twenty minutes outputting useless and requiring me to re-merge it with the sorted info which kills another twenty minutes), and then you tell me that you want the job stacked in a specific way that can only be done in FusionPro (which requires me to completely rebuild the file and then re-merge it, eating up another twenty minutes), then I get angry.
Do the math. This is a job I should’ve spent thirty minutes on, and it winds up taking two hours of my day because nobody thought the whole thing through and gave me all the information I needed to do the job properly the first time. This sort of thing happens on a daily basis, and by the end of the week it’s no great stretch to say that I spent forty hours accomplishing twenty hours worth of work. This is what’s known as working hard instead of working smart, and it’s just no damn good. And the sad thing is, it’s so easy to avoid this situation.
Here’s the key: THINK BACKWARDS.
When you initiate a job, take a moment to picture the finished product, and think backwards through the entire project, noting everything that needs to happen along the way. What does the Post Office need this thing to look like? What does your digital printer jockey need to output what the P.O. needs? What does your design guy need to set the job up properly before sending it to the digital copier? What does the person who turns Excel files into sorted mail databases need in order to give the design guy a workable file? What should you tell the client to do in Excel so that they provide something your crew can work with? Most importantly, when does this damn thing need to mail, and how long does each of these steps take to complete, and after you add all that up and count backwards, when is the last day your client can provide you with art and data and still expect to have the job finished on schedule? Chances are that the answer to that question is something like “two days before they called you in the first place”, so you and all your coworkers are usually under the gun and running to catch up from the project’s inception. Which means you don’t have any time to waste. Which means you really don’t have time to turn the thirty minutes I should have spent on a job into two hours. In other words, you don’t have time to waste dragging your heels, but you also don’t have time to waste rushing ahead without a plan.
So please, I’m begging you... plan ahead and think backwards. It’s worth the extra few minutes it takes to think the whole thing through so your shop can work smart instead of hard. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to get forty hours of work done in forty hours. And then I won’t get angry.
No comments:
Post a Comment