A big part of board game design and publishing is being able to get things done on a schedule. This is especially hard when dealing with game development, as knowing when a game if going to be done can definitely be a hard thing. There are however, plenty of things you can do to try to get closer to that done stage.
Monthly Goals or Focus
If you have no goals set so far, it’s better to start with monthly goals, as your weekly and daily goals should support the monthly goal. Your monthly goal doesn’t even need to be a goal, but more of a focus, if you want. It can be something like, “Further the Worker Placement Design”, “Get faster at making prototypes”, or “Network a bunch”.
You should have 1-3 monthly goals, but not many more than that. It lets you actually make significant progress if you only have a few things to work on, which is something that will definitely help make you stick to your goals. If you can see progress, you can see that your work is paying off and it’ll be easier to stay productive.
Weekly Goals
You should get a little more detailed with these goals and having more of them is perfectly fine. Something like 5-7 goals should give you a good amount of areas to work on and should be based on either your monthly goals or anything that’s time sensitive.
Daily Tasks
When making daily tasks, I usually have more than I can actually get done in a day, so that I can pick and choose to work on the things that I want to work on and that I can work on. Tasks each require a different amount of time, creativity, and brain power and if you don’t have what you need to do something, you want to use your time in the best way possible.
Start by looking at what your weekly goals are and breaking each down into separate steps that can be completely done in a given timeframe. You’ll want things to take between 10 – 90 minutes ideally. Less time if you don’t get long times to focus. You might want to break down all your weekly goals at the same time, then scheduling in each of the tasks to a certain day of the week so that it makes starting each day and knowing what to work on really fast, so you can get to working, instead of wondering what you should be doing.
Routine
The most important part about having goals is actually using them. You’ll need to revisit your goals on a regular basis.
For the daily goals, I find looking at them at the start of the day works best. I look at all the things that I didn’t complete the previous day and reassign priority to them. Sometimes what was really important the day before becomes not as important and vice versa, as there’s plenty you can learn as you complete things or just as time passes.
I make a task on a certain day of the week to check up on my weekly goals. Again, going over what your previous goals were and what actually got accomplished is very important. It’s also important not to focus on the fact that you didn’t do what you thought you would. You might have switched priorities or just taken a bit longer than expected. It’s natural to not be good at figuring out how long things will take as we’re all really bad at this until we get some practice.
The same with the weekly goals, every month, look at what you wanted to finish the previous month and see what you’d like to focus on next.
Conclusion
The important part in all of this is not to focus on what you haven’t done, but what you have and how you’re getting better.
In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about different tools to make all of this easy!
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