Bill Watterson's approach to deadlines

I noted down a discipline practice that one of my favorite creators used. I had also seen this practice with a successful student, Yesh Dattareya, at the OMSCS.

His (Bill Watterson's) approach to deadlines was to stay well ahead of them. When you’re faced with a due date (as he told Lee Nordling in Your Career in Comics) “there’s no quality control. It’s just garbage in, garbage out.” This was because “the never-ending pressure to meet deadlines encourages cartoonists to publish virtually everything they think up”. Watterson’s approach was instead to “stay far enough ahead of the deadlines that I can throw away mediocre material and write something better”. This is quality determined by quantity: the more stuff in the wastebasket, the better the strip.

Watterson was already working weeks and sometimes months ahead of schedule, refusing to submit second-tier work, maintaining this throughout six years of the licensing fight, and now he took more time than ever to think creatively about the Sunday strips suddenly requiring triple the effort to produce. It took more and more of his time to keep Calvin and Hobbes going. “I had to steal that extra time,” he confessed in Sunday Pages 1985-1995, “from what would have been some semblance of an ordinary life.”