I think we'd be astonished to know how many prolific cartoonists self-identify as "lazy". https://twitter.com/joeyweiser/status/1145678808231624704

I have always thought of myself as lazy, or an underachiever, or in some other way not living up to an unquantifiable potential ideal output.

It's ADHD in a nutshell; it takes an astronomical amount of mental effort to muscle through work deemed "uninspiring" by the capricious goblins in my skull, so I avoid it, or drop the ball, or flake out.

About ten years ago, I was talking with someone at a convention and hadn't done much comics industry stuff in a while. They asked what I'd been doing, and I started naming projects from the past year. Storyboards for this. This many pages of educational comics. Illustrations.

When I ran out of fingers to count them, my face took on what I'm sure was a pretty dumb look. Ohhhh yeah... huh. Maybe I did get a couple things done this year.

I do need help to prioritize the right things. I do have trouble pushing through if I find the work to be rote and uninspiring. I do sometimes lavish attention on unimportant details. I know from experience these tendencies are frustrating to collaborators. But...

...I'm not lazy. Neither are you. We require a hook to get invested in a work. We need it to be special. We need the progress to be satisfying. A clunker of a line has to be fixed before continuing. A frustrating obstacle sends us onto a procrastination spree. These are problems.

But they are not moral failings. They are the way our brains work, and when they are firing on all cylinders, it means the work can be delightful. We are not motivated by the same things as others. That is okay.

We've all come up with ways to work around this executive decision-making dysfunction one way or another. Setting up restrictive parameters to manage expectations. Brainstorming lists to give you lots of options when at the drawing table.

Taking breaks and doing uncreative work while our brains recharge. Keeping regular hours, sleeping enough, + eating well to keep the swings under control.

It's like there's a raccoon with a metal detector in your brain that knows when you've made something great, but absolutely cannot be controlled, only corralled.

But to my original point: look at the work you've done in the past X amount of days, weeks, months, years. Include everything. Researching counts. Design counts. Thinking about story counts. You might not have put down every line that you wanted to, but you are not lazy.

Corralling that fucking raccoon is not easy. But it's the only way to do the work YOU want to do, on a timeline that makes YOU happy. Doing a bunch of forgettable junk isn't the goal here.

Some of your usual productivity tips are useful. A lot are not. The key for me is to avoid the grandiose overpromising that I do internally. "This is going to be the best story of all time." Hey buddy, how about a serviceable mystery first. You can make it amazing in draft 2.

Doing half a dozen 24-Hour Comics was another thing that absolutely wrenched my third eye open. Sometimes pages that seem crappy when you're knocking them out hour after hour are perfectly adequate when you read them back the next day. (eternal tip of the pen to @scottmccloud )

Sometimes there are mistakes that you'd fix in a second draft. But now you know your path. You can make those fixes in 1/10 the time of agonizingly doing them all right the first time.