I don’t have a good internal sense of time. I tend not to know what day it is, can’t guess the hour with any accuracy, forget to eat lunch until 3 p.m., often let my tea steep for far too long, never leave the office at 5:00 unless I have to be somewhere else (in which case I’m typically late), stay up til 1:00 almost every night even if I’m having to hold my eyelids up with toothpicks, and tend to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. I try to counter this deficiency by setting my watch and all the clocks in my house at least five minutes fast, always setting a timer when I make tea at home, and making vigorous use of the alarms in Entourage and Google Calendar.
At my last two jobs, the problem was compounded by the fact that there were no schedules—or, at least, none that were posted or that anybody paid attention to. At the latter place in particular, the work plan was a mystery served with warm enigma glaze and an invisible cherry on top. I started to write you a timeline for a typical day, but then I thought I might get arrested and put in one of the CIA’s secret—but empty, honest!—prisons. Such opacity and evasion as I and my fellow “production artists” witnessed when trying to figure out what was really due when could only mean that our schedule was a matter of national security, and that we were being left out of the loop for our own protection.
So instead, I will focus on the positive, which is that I now work in a place where the schedules are explicit, universally distributed, and continually updated. I usually receive the necessary piles of manuscript or proofs well in advance of their due dates, and I even have time to file papers, eat lunch outside the building, study my predecessors’ work, chat by the water cooler, and once in a while turn things in before they’re due. Crazy.
So, what’s on these magnificent schedules? Here’s the typical order of operations for designing a book interior, as seen from my (heptagonal!) office:
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