Don Macdonald is an artist who lives in Boston. Below he explains how he uses Basecamp to stay on schedule while writing and drawing graphic novels.
I use Basecamp to make sure I keep on schedule writing and drawing my graphic novels—Machiavelli and the upcoming Marlowe. I use weekly milestones for pages with attached to-do lists (from templates) for the individual steps I need to take to complete a page: rough pencils, finished pencils, inks, paint, and scan. Templated to-dos are really useful because I'm doing the same steps—albeit for different pages with different artwork—over and over. I also use it to schedule my uploads to my web site.
Since I'm working on my own, I use Basecamp solely as a project management/scheduling tool, although I'll also use messages for notes regarding research or thoughts about the project I want to remember. As anyone who has worked on a large scale project like a novel can attest, it's easy to lose track of time; using Basecamp, I can make sure I'm not falling behind my goals for book completion. One big benefit to the application is that it's not a distraction in and of itself—no fiddling with settings, contexts, priorities, and other time-sinks. It gets out of my way and lets me (makes me?) get to work.
