Global StatisticsThe entire project took 482 hours. I’m quite sharp with my timing, so this is only hours of solid work. If I started browsing YouTube I would stop the timer etc. I predicted 500 hours, so that’s bang on, really.
Overall it took on average 9 hours to write and fully draw a chapter of manga. This was almost exactly my prediction I made at the beginning of 10 hours, based off the time it took to do certain stages of work in my Dark Strike manga. So generally I didn’t get much faster than I was already going, but I’m pretty fast to begin with these days, so that can’t be helped.
Here's how much I worked on the project each week:

I struggled to hit higher than 35 hours a week, even when I had pending work for the following week. I hope to be able to improve on my focus and break through that barrier next time. Generally though I put a consistently high amount of time into the project each week, except the blip at the end. The fact that I was able to put so much time in when I was also at work (but part time) really shows the amount I have grown in my ability to focus well, and I hope to improve it even more in the future.
Here’s the number of hours work to produce each chapter of manga each week:


Generally the first few weeks I spent more time on each task as I was unsure of what I was doing, but as the weeks progress You can see the chapters were easier to complete in less time. I sort of didn't get much faster past the halfway point, so that's probably when I hit peak efficiency.
Some general stats and totals:

Each project took almost the exact same time in total and had very similar numbers when comparing each statistic, so I won’t compare them much here except with my shiny graphs. I’m sort of glad that they took the same amount of time as it means I was working at a stable rate, but I was hoping to see that the simpler project Et Cetera would take less time than a more complex project Whispering Magic. Which it actually did - Et Cetera took 110 hours and Whispering Magic took 126. Not really a massive difference, but perhaps enough to show I was right in my expectations.
I was glad that the time per page was quite low - only 30 minutes per page, writing and everything. That’s a massive drop from the 1hr40min from my previous project, and although the art quality is scrappy, I feel like I’ve learned just as much working at this quality, and more, since I’ve been able to do more stuff in the same time.
A very interesting chart (sort of a gantt chart) I made shows the level of work done each day in the week. You can clearly see the cascade of work as I work on projects on different days, as well as the rush on the last day where I’m working on each projects for hours. This is my favourite chart although it’s not very useful, just pretty :P
A taller bar means longer time spent each day on each manga. Hopefully that’s clear.

And another version where the darker the bar, the longer spent.

These charts are quite interesting as it shows in the beginning I solidly worked on each project in turn, but in the second half of the project I worked evenly on each project at the same time (writing all the scripts first, then drawing all the guidelines etc) This really shows the importance of eliminating context switching in my work, as it’s much easier to a long stretch of the same task than to keep jumping around. When the project got harder, I naturally switched patterns of work and this really helped.
GraphsI was very meticulous with my recording of how long it took to do each stage, as I wanted some definite metrics to help with future projects.
Probably the best chart, same as last time, is the time spent on different tasks in each chapter

As always, the main drawing takes up the most time, with the main writing a close second. I think there will always be stages that naturally take more time than others, so it’s not worth trying to make them quicker if the project loses quality.
I broke down some of the main tasks to see how this varied each week.
Script writing

I was honestly expecting to pick up speed with my writing as I gained experience, but perhaps I was being a bit too optimistic about how much skill I would gain over the project. Overall it seems the time didn’t change from beginning to end, and probably varied with my mood each week rather than any other factor.
I found it easier to write scripts one after each other, rather than doing one entire chapter and then moving on to the next one. That’s definitely a context switching thing, it’s much easier to keep momentum for one type of task.
Guidelines

This showed a much better trend of getting faster from week to week, and I was definitely trying to go faster with the guidelines. I found that I could lower the guideline quality and still ink the pages to the same quality even if the guidelines had errors and mistakes (because I notice the mistakes while inking and make corrections). I think it’s possible to get even faster but I’m not sure how the quality would fare.
Inking

Again there is a general downward trend of speeding up a little with my inking, but each chapter has wildly varying values. I think complexity of chapter definitely had an effect on drawing time (obviously), but I was working faster near the end of the project definitely.
An interesting but ultimately pointless metric is how many lines of script make how many panels of manga. This varies massively because some panels will have a lot of description, and others will have nothing but the character’s dialogue, and I’ll draw the panel off the top of my head. But there was a definite more script=more panels trend.
