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…