Attention Deficit Creator Disorder

Just a little busy.^note Not Pictured: Star Wars, Person of Interest, Lovecraft Country

Interviewer: I want to tell everybody out there, for the record, no new Mike Portnoy projects were started during the making of this interview.
Portnoy: I’m actually not so sure about that.

— Metalholic.com Q&A on The Adrenaline Mob

Sometimes a creator becomes extremely popular, and thus extremely in demand. Or perhaps they become so enamored of their own abilities that they believe everyone wants to see the results of every idea they have. Or maybe it's just their natural state, who knows? Or maybe no one else can be trusted to get it right?

But in any event, the creator winds up turning their attention to more than one project at a time, sometimes many more. These projects may have staying power, or they may fall by the wayside fairly quickly. It may result in one of their projects lying dormant for days, months, even years, and then suddenly seeing a burst of new activity as the creator's other projects lie gathering dust for awhile.

Sometimes a creator winds up having this through no fault of their own, as their projects encounter Executive Meddling regularly and they thus have to keep many of them in the air, never knowing which one will be given a chance to survive.

Attention Deficit Creator Disorder (or ADCD) can often lead to the quality of the overall projects (or at least some of them) suffering, or at the very least a Schedule Slip, sometimes regular and sometimes unannounced.

Also, sometimes it's not another project that's causing the creator's attention to wander, but merely that they feel they have something more entertaining to do. If a webcomic has regular bouts of "Did you expect a comic today? Silly readers, Katamari Fantasy XXIV was released today, no updates this week!", you're probably seeing ADCD in action.

Creators who suffer this may be especially prone to Borrowing from the Sister Series to save time.

Not to be confused with the band AC/DC. Or with Attention Deficit... Ooh, Another Project!

Also shouldn't be used as a substitute for or confirmation of ADHD.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Osamu Tezuka certainly was the top-player of this trope. He worked on multiple comics during the same time, often being confronted with harsh deadlines, sometimes forced to finish 30 pages in one night. And he made it. He created seven hundred finished and unfinished manga series during his life, spanning everything from multi-volume Long-Runners like Astro Boy to graphic novels like Ode to Kirihito. Sadly, his masterpiece Phoenix remained unfinished.
  • He also was a passionate animator and anime director, yet never achieved the same status in that regard.
• CLAMP. To date, they have worked on at least 25 different series during their 24 year-long career, most of which were in running alongside each other at some point. They currently have two series on indefinite hiatus, two other series that have been ongoing since 2011, one of which came out of a hiatus that lasted for eight years, and, they've also just added a third series to their workload, which is actually the unexpected continuation of a series they'd officially but unceremoniously ended two years ago. This list doesn't include their work in character designing for anime and books, nor articles and short-stories for various magazines.
  • Granted, the vast number of works can be attributed to the fact that CLAMP, rather than being one person, is a group of four artists working together. However, it should also be noted that unlike other mangaka who usually have a team of assistants at their beck and call, they are the sole workers on their series.
• While her list of works isn't quite as lengthy, Yukiru Sugisaki beats the pants off of CLAMP when it comes to unfinished series. This is a woman who has left two series unfinished for 15+ years, started a number of other series within that time, of which only one has been confirmed to be completed. Her most shenanigans involve her starting the series 1001 Knights and then following up by starting Junkissa Neko two months later.
• Naoko Takeuchi had enough of this when she was pouring all her attention into writing Sailor Moon, making Codename: Sailor V take far too long to complete.
• For 27 years, Rumiko Takahashi was working on at least two manga series regularly (3 from 1984-86) as well as producing one-shot "Rumic Theatre" comics.
• Im Dal Young is currently working on several projects at once, some with irregular schedules and at least one on hiatus.
• Pokémon Adventures is in a unique position in that its creator can suffer ADCD with it alone. Different arcs are published simultaneously and in different magazines; this can get confusing when reading the magazines as the events don't properly get put in order until the official volumes are released. The Emerald arc was put onto hiatus for a whole year, the Platinum arc went through a major Schedule Slip, the HeartGold/SoulSilver arc was horribly rushed, and the Black 2/White 2 arc came close to being an Orphaned Series. On the plus side, Kusaka Hidenori is allowed to make major revisions in the official volume releases, smoothing out quite a lot of continuity kinks and expanding the plots as he does so. Hidenori himself notes this and wonders if anybody, much less kids, can keep up with his stories in the magazine releases.
• Miyabi Fujieda finished two mangas and is currently updating one (semi-regularly), while the remaining two have been gathering dust for literal years now.
• Masaki Tsuzuki, the creator of Lyrical Nanoha franchise, has been accused of this trope on an entirely different level: each season so far has fallen into a different genre.
• Noboyuki Fukumoto, creator of Akagi and Kaiji, suffers from this heavily. He's been writing and drawing Akagi since 92, Kaiji since 96, and all the while he worked on other, fairly major works, at least one of which went on indefinite hiatus without being completed. Currently he's working on three separate manga.
• Kazuya Minekura, the creator of Saiyuki, Saiyuki Gaiden, Saiyuki Ibun, Wild Adapter, Executive committee, Bus Gamer, and more, tends to juggle a few projects at once. This often ends in works being put on hiatus, usually due to her health problems. (Note that the only finished work in the above list is Saiyuki Gaiden, which unsurprisingly judging by its name, is the prequel to Saiyuki).
• Hidekaz Himaruya has had this ever since he began drawing comics. He's worked on Hetalia: Axis Powers and Chibisan Date, with either one falling into spontaneous and unannounced hiatuses as he works on the other. His Hetalia blog ceased updating in mid-2012 (and the 2011 Christmas event was never completed), though Comic Birz still publishes a new story every month. His two oldest series, Barjona Bombers and Advance Kitakou Broadcasting Club, have been collecting dust for years and probably only Himaruya himself would know if they'll ever be resumed.
• Peach-Pit had this for a while. At one time they working simultaneously on Rozen Maiden, Zombie Loan, and Shugo Chara!.
• Cool-Kyou Shinsha often has multiple ongoing manga at any one time, at one point having as many as 11 at once. His simplistic art style definitely helps.
• Gen Urobuchi was like this in the mid-2010s.
  • He only worked on the plot outline and two episodes of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, the first and the last (which he unexpectedly came back for).
  • Despite the incredible impact and influence that Puella Magi Madoka Magica had on the entire anime landscape, after the Rebellion movie he cut all ties with the franchise. After that movie, Madoka Magica's subsequent works have been few and far in between.
  • A very infamous example was in the anime Aldnoah.Zero where he freely admitted at Anime Expo 2014 that he only wrote the scripts for the first 3 episodes due to him being very busy at the time focusing on Kamen Rider Gaim. The most hardcore disgruntled viewers have never stopped ranting about how the series's quality collapsed after Episode 3, while others who are more charitable say the quality drop mostly happened in the second half of the show.
  • Another very influential and popular anime of the 2010s created by him, Psycho-Pass, falls victim to this too. He had no involvement with the second season as he was busy working on the 2015 movie, and then he was also involved in the development of Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness, also in 2015. After that year, though, all his involvement with the franchise ceased, and the development of all its future works proceeded without him.
  • For the most part, all his energy is now focused on Thunderbolt Fantasy, minus the Godzilla film trilogy he also worked on.

Arts

• Leonardo da Vinci and other men of The Renaissance were especially prone to this. The Mona Lisa was apparently done in fits and starts. While employed by the Duke of Milan, Leonardo had plans for a huge bronze statue of a horse and rider that never happened. During this time he was also working on and off on The Last Supper, which wound up taking about three years. Although the horse did finally get built. The horse statue wasn't his fault, though: Milan ended up in a war when he was in designing stages, and the bronze meant for the statue was used to make cannons, instead.

Comic Books

• Joss Whedon. Besides running Buffy and Angel at the same time, had various other pokers in the fire, including trying to start up Firefly. He's still working on getting a few series started, as well as writing and co-writing multiple comics, both in the Buffyverse and for Marvel as well as another Firefly comic.
• Pat Lee, of the defunct Dreamwave Productions Transformers: Generation One, became notorious for penciling the first few issues of a series, and then handing it off to another artist. Readers have hypothesized this was to boost the sales of each new series by advertising a star artist. The fact that Pat Lee also spent his employee's salaries on new sports cars and robbed his investors blind indicates he just didn't give a crap.
• Joe Madureira had a little of the regular kind and a little of the "can't be bothered" kind. After building an elaborate office full of toys and entertainment, he and his employees were apparently more concerned with having Nerf wars than getting out issues of Battle Chasers. And besides, doing up covers for PSM resulted in faster, easier paychecks.
• Ben Dunn has a tendency to start up new comics and then abandon them fairly quickly, possibly due to low sales and fans fairly quickly recognizing whatever anime and manga he snagged elements from to make them. (One of the non-starters was an almost ridiculously transparent amalgamation of Ah! My Goddess and YuYu Hakusho.)
  • Obamouse and Enter The Zombie, lasted one issue each.
• Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, during the Silver Age.
  • Stan Lee supervised Marvel Comics and wrote virtually the entire line, from Amazing Spider-Man to Millie the Model. They operated via the "Marvel Method." Instead of writing a full script, Lee would write a general plot, which was then given to Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko (in the case of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange) to draw. After receiving Jack's pencils, Stan would then write the finished script. This was a huge workload for both men, especially for Kirby who drew The Mighty Thor, Fantastic Four and other anthology titles (it generally takes a lot longer to draw a comic than to write a script, leave alone the outlines and dialogue that Stan Lee wrote), all produced in a short period of time.
  • The Marvel Method put a lot of the storytelling responsibility on the artist's shoulders, and later led to considerable controversy (not to mention lawsuits) over who should get what sort of credit for "creating" the story, especially since towards the end, Kirby and Ditko supplied dialogue suggestions in boxes for Lee to follow. Nonetheless Lee deserves credit for creating an unified sense of style without which the Marvel Shared Universe would probably not take off (both Kirby and Ditko being too individualistic in style to really cohere together without Lee). None of the key creator's solo efforts (Lee's, Kirby's, Ditko's) matched the impact of their "Marvel Method" collaborations.
• Brian Michael Bendis. A prolific writer for Marvel, at any given point is the main writer for three/four (sometimes more) headlining comic franchises (Ultimate Spider-Man), at one point both Mighty- and New Avengers, Powers as well as being a main co-writer for any and all major Marvel events, as well as being involved in some form of movie developments, both Marvel-owned and his own properties, on top of his indie comics, which he both writes and draws himself.
  • He's picking up even more titles! He's doing a new series called Scarlet and writing the new Moon Knight ongoing. Is it possible for a writer to have Wolverine Publicity?
  • And when he became a DC only writer, he was given all Superman titles. And when we say all of them, we mean all of them, including the Legion of Super-Heroes and Young Justice (2019), whose only connection to Superman is that each team has a Superboy as a member.
• Jason Robinson, creator/writer/artist of The Demon Mages, puts a lot of effort into building his world and characters, but only two volumes of saidsame comic have been published to date: the first in 2008, and the second in 2010. That said, Robinson is also a freelance artist who has collaborated in projects with WayForward Technologies and Lab Zero Games (the Skullgirls developers).
• Geoff Johns is basically running the DC Universe, being responsible for the revivals of both Barry Allen as The Flash and Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern. He spearheaded several of DC's Crisis Crossovers nearly back to back with Blackest Night, Brightest Day & Flashpoint, wrote a couple of miniseries during Final Crisis, restarted Adventure Comics to write Superboy again, helped with the DC reboot with him on Justice League & Aquaman, and with the first big event for the New 52, Forever Evil, helped write several of the villain books, wrote the first few arcs of Justice League of America and wrote F.E.'s main story. And then there's Doomsday Clock, the much publicized integration of the Watchmen characters in the mainstream DCU. Geoff Johns doesn't sleep. Geoff Johns is powered entirely by the Silver Age.
  • And that's not to mention the writing of plenty of live-action adaptations he had hands in, such as Titans, Doom Patrol, Stargirl, Aquaman, SHAZAM!, Wonder Woman 1984... the guy knows to keep busy.
• Warren Ellis. At this very moment he's probably working on a dozen different comics and two or three screenplays. And when we're ever going to see another issue of, say, Desolation Jones is anybody's guess.
• Robert freaking Kirkman is another example.
• Jhonen Vasquez is made of this trope. He never sticks with any project for very long.
• Rob Liefeld seemed to love creating new series, then forget about them partway through. Also he was very prone to Schedule Slip on the titles he did continue.
• J. Scott Campbell's schedule seems to be comparable to Tectonic Plate Shifts. He's hugely in-demand as a pin-up/cover artist, but his work drawing comic interiors either never got finished or never materialized at all. His greatest claim to fame was Danger Girl, (which itself suffered from ridiculously long delays, imagine that) which he co-created in the late '90s and seems to still be riding off the success of, despite contributing nothing but covers to the series over the last 10+ years.
• Jason Aaron in the last few years was working on several Wolverine comics, Ghost Rider, Scalped and Hellblazer while working on miniseries and giving guest apperances in other comics; at one point he was working on four ongoing series at the same time - The Punisher MAX, Wolverine, Wolverine and the X-Men and The Incredible Hulk. What's funny is that only one of them (Punisher) suffered from Schedule Slip and that's because of the artist, who had to deal with personal matters, so Marvel had to put the series on a very long hiatus.
• Scott Snyder is an example that somehow manages to keep his quality up despite his work load. Hitting it big with American Vampire, he soon penned a highly acclaimed run on Detective Comics and a mini-series, Gates Of Gotham, before the DC relaunch. Now, he's the writer for both the Batman and Swamp Thing monthlies where he's coordinating events shared with other books (Swamp Thing is with Animal Man, and the Night of the Owls event in the Bat-Books), in addition to American Vampire.
• It's currently unclear how Ian Flynn manages to get any sleep. At one point, he was the writer of five monthly books for Archie Comics at once: Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), Sonic Universe, Sonic Boom, Mega Man (Archie Comics), and the New Crusaders reboot. He has also written several one-offs in the Archie series. Add to that his personal forums were acting as a second job, leading him to shut them down in early 2016. At the end of 2019, he posted a tweet of everything he had done that year, which included Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW), a personal webcomic, two secret projects, several mini-series and recording his own podcast. He feels like it was a slow year.
• A quick look at Alan Davis's output shows that, after hitting a certain degree of acclaim in the early 2000's, he never stayed on any title for longer than six issues. His art is popular enough to boost sales, so he keeps getting work popping issue sales and putting out his own projects for DC and Marvel (mostly Marvel).
• Michael Fleisher's run on 2000 AD had him script revivals for Rogue Trooper and Harlem Heroes as well as original strips such as Junker. He had written so many strips that some of his Harlem Heroes stories were printed years after he'd been fired from the comic.
• Lewis Trondheim wrote and/or drew about 150 books since the beginning of the 90ies, while other French authors rarely release more than 1 or 2 books per year.
• In 2015, Kieron Gillen had a full plate: Angela: Asgard's Assassin, Siege, and Star Wars: Darth Vader for Marvel; The Wicked + The Divine, Phonogram, and The Ludocrats for Image; Über, Crossed: Badlands, and Mercury Heat for Avatar Press. With so many titles, Gillen had to announce he was taking a break from the Marvel Universe after Secret Wars, since it was getting to be too much.
• Alan Moore is famous in the comics industry for writing really long, really detailed scripts, packed with information about each panel and everything it contains. In The '80s, Moore worked on the following titles over a ten year period (some of which were published at a later period because it takes longer to draw and publish a comic than it is to write): Miracleman, Captain Britain, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, A Small Killing, Big Numbers, Brought to Light, From Hell, Lost Girls not to mention his famous lengthy run on Swamp Thing, his many DC stories such as The Killing Joke and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?.
• Stjepan Sejic is an artist for Switch, Rat Queens, Aphrodite IX, and Ravine. He is also the artist and writer for Sunstone and Death Vigil. He is also a cover artist for various franchises. He then, on top of this workload, draws plenty of high-quality personal artwork. His reaction to his workload for 2015 has him going Super Saiyan.
  • As of August 2016, Sejic seems to have hit creator burnout. It turns out that working on multiple projects at his pace for twelve years doesn't come without its downsides. His health degenerating to the point where it's a struggle for him to even hold a pen properly made him realize he needed to pull back and take a break from at least one of his projects.
• Paul Grist, while an undoubted talent, has developed a bad name among comic fans for the way in which his creator-owned series (notably Jack Staff, Kane, and Mudman) tend to peter out or take very lengthy breaks. The fact that he also has a tendency to Kudzu Plot doesn't help.
• Jim Lee, who even has the added hurdle of mostly doing the hard part of comics (art) and for a while even worked as editor\publisher. When he left Marvel, Lee helped create four titles for WildStorm, Wild C.A.T.s (WildStorm), Stormwatch, Deathblow and Gen13, drawing at least one issue of each. Lee even took the blame for the terrible Schedule Slip of All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder (supposedly a 12 issue monthly series, it ended up Cut Short at 10, across three years!), saying the scripts were done, but his art was sidelined by DC Universe Online and other commitments.

Fan Works

Inevitably the good writers you actually like will become so prolific and excited about their amazing ideas that they start four or five different projects and never finish more than one. Which really blows when a Dead Fic winds up happening after a bloody horrible cliffhanger.

• Nimbus Llewelyn, known for writing epic crossovers such as The Wizard in the Shadows and The Child of the Storm universe, is infamous for this. While over half his posted fics are complete, almost all of those are stand alone one shots. An inconsistent update schedule doesn't help - sometimes he goes months at a time without updating, sometimes he puts out three chapters in a week. The scale of his writing doesn't really help, either, with chapters frequently exceeding 10,000 words, and the latter fic has an unpublished word count spiralling into the millions. This is apparently part of the problem, since he frequently gets distracted by new plot bunnies, which he partially develops and then almost never publishes, or by later parts of the fic 'verse. He has acknowledged this tendency, however, and has stated that if he ever loses the will to write further sequels to Child of the Storm, he'll hand his notes over to someone he thinks will do the fic justice, or post a synopsis of what was intended to happen with excerpted scenes.
• Innortal is a prime offender of the above, having only completed a whopping seven out of his thirty-eight stories, most of which are for Ranma ½ and/or Sailor Moon. When Angels Fall is also infamous for its epilogue which borders or falls directly into Gainax Ending territory.
• Shadow Crystal Mage also falls into this, having fifty-six stories, only sixteen of which are labeled as finished, and of the remaining forty, thirty have been updated over the past year.
  • Fellow Ala Iridia member Overmaster also has this problem having problems of getting around to A Home Under Those Red Skies and near constantly rebooting his Unequally Rational and Emotional series.
• NeonZangetsu is quite possibly the king of this trope, having currently 201 stories, few, if any of which are finished, or have more than a couple of chapters.
• Aya Macchiato tends to suffer from this. Primarily writing for the Harry Potter fandom, she is known for creating some of the best dark!Harry fanfics on the web... but she sometimes gets distracted by the next Plot Bunny that comes by, so partially because of this trope, pretty much anything and/or everything she writes tends to inevitably be dropped and get turned into a Dead Fic.
• VerizionKittypet suffers from this quite hard. Out of all her stories, the only ones she's finished so far are all oneshots. Yes, she didn't even finish the story where she celebrated the start of 2010.
• Pokejedservo is also an admitted sufferer of this phenomenon. While Pokejedservo is still working on series' such as Neo Geo Saga Arcade Mode, Takahashi Trifecta and his own attempts at Epic Rap Battles (amongst other projects), but most of his larger projects are far from finished. In fact some of his earlier series' have been put on an "indefinite hold" for a while now (but he hasn't truly ruled out the possibility of reviving them). Anyways despite all of this Pokejedservo has a fairly easy time coming up with ideas for stories and think them through but actually getting them fully written down can be the difficult part.
• Ryuugi is infamous for this to the point that he's memetically known for never finishing a story. The Games We Play is unique for how long he's managed to keep it going.
  • In the late 90s/early millennium, John Biles would be running about a dozen stories at once. Most of them crossovers within themselves, and several stories were crossovers with each other. He acknowledged this in his Author's Notes as a family quirk.
• Peptuck was notorious for this. Despite crafting very well-known stories like Tiberium Wars, Forward, and Renegade, you will notice that of all the fics he started after mid-2009, none of them are complete. The problem is that he was very much a crossover writer, and just when it looked like one of his crossovers was getting into the meat of the plot, he suddenly started another crossover. This happened three times since he started writing Renegade. His creative juices appear to have been squeezed dry, as no new chapters have been uploaded for any fics since Sept. 2016, and his profile itself was last updated in Sept. 2018.
• PerkyGoth14, have you SEEN her profile?! Over 900 stories and some have been revisited and some are still on a backburner. See for yourself.
• SkyRig, formerly known as Demons Anarchy of Pride and Starlight’s Poet, suffers from this as well. In 2019, he published 100 fics, all of which he claimed he wanted to complete at some point. Burnout for a good number of them as well as a recent bout of depression led him to delete almost half of them, cutting it down to 56 in November of that. He’s published a few new stories since then, such as a rewrite of a previous work. Regardless, he still tends to come up with a lot of story ideas, which leads to a bunch of them being put on the backburner. It doesn’t help that they tend to be set up as long-runners.
• Iron117Prime had to momentarily put Avengers of the Multi-verse on hiatus in part because he was concurrently working with multiple fanfics that are updated monthly. At the time of the hiatus' announcement, he was working on Code Prime^note which is nearing conclusion at the time, Fairy May Cry, the J-WITCH Series, A Red Rose in the Blue Wind, and an upcoming crossover between Amphibia and The Owl House.
• Flameal15k has this as an issue, with his currently updating works at the time of this writing including Conquest in the Name of Advancement!, Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction, Shifters of Flesh and Metal, Primeval Paradox, Code Grid, and The Baleful Bureau. This isn't even all the stories he's posted that have tropes pages. Part of this issue is that all five of the aforementioned works are part of one large Shared Universe (albeit very distantly in the case of the first story) and are being rotated through to reach the main crossover story, Coalescence.

Films — Live-Action

• Joss Whedon with The Avengers and The Cabin in the Woods. And then he did a secret modern-day adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing in the two week break between production and post-production of Avengers... y'know, for kicks. And then he managed Marvel's Phase 2 film slate (where he directed Avengers: Age of Ultron), as well as working on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series (where he left brother Jed and his wife to actually run the series), an experience that made him break ties with the studio afterwards.
• Joel and Ethan Coen frequently have more than one film in various stages of production at a time. For example, No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading were written at the same time (on alternating days, in fact), and shot more or less back to back. Not that this was a bad thing, in this case. Hail, Caesar! and The Yiddish Policeman's Union were produced simultaneously.
• Guillermo del Toro gave up on directing The Hobbit (eventually directed by Peter Jackson) because he was involved in way too many things, with his schedule filled for at least a decade. Not that it worked, as many of his projects entered Development Hell (such as adaptations of Frankenstein, Slaughterhouse-Five, At the Mountains of Madness, The Haunted Mansion, and Drood, and a third Hellboy, which Ron Perlman has all but given up on) and there is a huge discrepancy between the projects Del Toro joined in with what actually came out. Del Toro even gave up on working with a video game because after three cancelled projects, he fears no developer can survive working with him.
• Ridley Scott was attached to at least 9 projects in 2009 (only one of those came out, the "Alien Prequel", released in 2012; says something there's a whole page of his projects that never panned out). The man still releases movies yearly or bi-annually, and produces films and TV series, despite being in his eighties! Maybe Scott just wants to complete as many films as possible now that he still can.
• Another elder director who just likes to keep himself busy is Clint Eastwood. He is more successful in actually making his movies, even if it means releasing two in the same year - a rare case where Eastwood had to step out was A Star Is Born (2018).
• Did Jim Henson ever sleep? In the early eighties, he was simultaneously making The Great Muppet Caper and The Dark Crystal (both of which he directed and starred in), developing Fraggle Rock, and still somehow finding the time to tape segments for Sesame Street. Jim Henson is most likely an aversion, while the man did an ungodly amount of work in a very short time, he almost always finished what he started. Only his death left projects undone.
• The most prolific film-maker of the New Hollywood era isn't Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg, it was Robert Altman who made 15 films in 10 years. After the era ended, he was never able to match that rate of productivity again.
• Steven Spielberg himself, along with working at times in two movies at once - something that made him step down from Memoirs of a Geisha and only produce - got involved in producing movies and TV (including a stretch of animated cartoons from Tiny Toon Adventures to Toonsylvania, which even bill him above the title), and at times even delved into gaming with The Dig, Medal of Honor, and Boom Blox.
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder had directed nearly fifty movies in a 13-year career which was only cut short because he died. He also directed theater and radio plays in this period. Fassbinder shot and edited movies quickly, he released four movies a year in his early career and slowed down to two movies a year at the time of his death.
• Quentin Tarantino suffers from this whenever he finishes his last film. He talked about Inglourious Basterds ten years before it came out to the point where it became near-vaporware in Hollywood. He also talked about a Kill Bill Vol. 3 after the second one was released focusing on Vernita Green's daughter (which has never become anything concrete). In addition, he mentioned in passing a prequel to Inglourious Basterds after the film finally saw release. He's also talked for years about doing a Vega Brothers movie, uniting the two Vega brothers from Reservoir Dogs (Vic Vega aka "Mr. Blonde", played by Michael Madsen) and Pulp Fiction (Vincent Vega played by John Travolta). Eventually he abandoned the idea when the actors got too old. It's a common belief amongst Tarantino fans to take EVERY one of his proposed ideas with a grain of salt until filming actually starts.
• Tarantino's buddy Robert Rodriguez suffers from this. After Sin City came out, he began talking about a pair of sequels filmed back-to-back with new original material written by Frank Miller. After Miller failed to produce (mostly due to his new love of film directing) the sequels hit a major snag and even Mickey Rourke publicly announced he wasn't waiting up. Then, after Grindhouse was released Rodriguez was not only attached to Sin City 2/3 but a Machete feature film (which happened years later) plus remakes of Barbarella and Red Sonja with Rose McGowan (both of which were dropped). The Sin City sequel only came out of Development Hell in 2012. Once again, nobody believes any news regarding future Rodriguez projects until the cameras start rolling.
• Takashi Miike is credited as a director for over 100 movies and has been releasing at least two movies a year ever since the beginning of his career in 1991.
• His fellow countryman Sion Sono also leans towards this, having directed 6 movies in 2015 alone.
• Tim Burton admits he's one of these. The fact a whole Wikipedia page was made out of Burton projects that either died in Development Hell or moved to other hands shows he tries hard to do as many things as possible.
• The early career of Orson Welles was notorious for his hyperactive rate of productivity. He did multiple theatre and radio shadows, magic shows and any other idea that struck his fancy at the same time. Then he made Citizen Kane where he was busy from Day 1 to Premiere. His later career had Welles trying to keep this rate of production but he struggled because he so often had to delay one film or cancel another was because he ran out of money and had to do more acting work so he could afford to continue.
• Terrence Malick seems to have turned into this (ironic, given he is well known for the decades-long gaps between his projects), with To the Wonder and Knight Of Cups/Song to Song shooting back-to-back
• Nicolas Winding Refn (of Drive (2011) fame) has been hit by this lately. First, there was a Logan's Run remake set to star Ryan Gosling, which never materialized. Second, there was an adaptation of The Incal, also set to star Gosling, which also never materialized. Finally, he settled on an original project, The Neon Demon, along with producing a remake of Maniac Cop.
• Hal Roach is the most credited producer on the IMDb with his name attached to over 1200 projects, mostly short films. His most famous creations were the Laurel and Hardy films and the Our Gang series.
• In 2020-2021, Zack Snyder worked on Army of the Dead (on which he's a Copiously Credited Creator) and the Netflix franchise spawning from it, his version of Justice League, a Norse Mythology animated series, and his Space Opera, Rebel Moon.
• James Cameron revealed that in The '80s, he was writing The Terminator, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Aliens simultaneously. He wrote them on separate typewriters.
• Steven Soderbergh knows how to keep himself busy, having worked on a new movie or show every year since 1995.

Literature

• Many of the more prolific Baen Books writers are prolific both in total output and in the number of series they have out. David Weber, John Ringo, and Eric Flint are particularly notable for it.
  • David Weber has claimed that he does this so that he won't burn out on any particular series. He can write a book in one setting, then write a book in the next, like a bodybuilder working different parts of his body each day. Of course, if you're only a fan of one series, expect to wait a long while for the next book.
    • The Hell's Gate trilogy is an extreme example — the second book came out in 2007, and the third... is being written, but there's no set completion date; current expectation is around 2016. Maybe.
    • The third book has been written. However, since it has been so long since the first two, Baen wants to re-release the first two before publishing books three and four.
• Stephen King has a less arduous schedule than most, but at certain points, he's got a couple of novels peppered with short stories and perhaps a screenplay. He has said that turning The Green Mile into a Serial Novel saved it from the slosh pile, because there were too many things on his plate at the time.
• Apparently the default state of quite a few authors, such as Australian fantasy authors Garth Nix and Isobelle Carmody. Both of them generally work on more than two things at once (on and off). This, however, seems to be how they've always worked, so whether it affects their standard of writing will probably always remain a mystery. Nix, at least, seems fairly good at avoiding schedule slip.
• George R. R. Martin is working on an epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and also has his hands in a dozen other smaller scale projects, not least being creative-consulting and writing an episode a season of Game of Thrones. And he's quite the fan of football and collecting miniature knights. During the egregiously long wait between the fourth and fifth books, fans began to grumble that Martin was too distracted by his other projects. He wrote a Dear Negative Reader on the subject, saying that the people complaining "didn't want him to do anything but wrote on A Song of Ice and Fire — ever!" Part of the problem might be that Martin has spent his entire career switching between genres and mediums, and now he's been stuck writing the same story about the same characters for well over a decade. Apparently what made him decide to write a Door Stopper series was that he wanted a chance to make the story as long as he wanted. He may have gotten a bit more than he bargained for... Martin actually recognizing he was too busy was when Game of Thrones caught up with the released books in 2015, making him step out of anything but a sci-fi anthology he edits the following year, trying to solve the huge Schedule Slip the sixth A Song Of Ice And Fire book had entered.
• Isaac Asimov typically worked on several books at once. He claimed it helped him avoid writer's block. Since he wrote fiction and non-fiction on a wide variety of subjects, and since his target audience would vary from book to book, the practical problems he had to deal with would vary widely depending on what he was writing. As a result, if he got stuck in one book, he'd give his brain a breather by switching to another.
  • Asimov also loved writing so much that he hated vacations. According to one story, he came back from a trip, kissed the walls of his office, and sat right back down at the typewriter, never to leave it again.
• Geoffrey Chaucer left us with a number of unfinished works; while scholars debate why particular ones may be unfinished, he does seem to have abandoned more than one collection of tales for a bigger and better collection of tales, culminating in The Canterbury Tales (which are, as you might suspect, one of the unfinished works). He was also a pretty busy guy doing lots of things that weren’t writing (among other things, he had some hand in politics, and wrote a bit of non-fiction as well; the guy was pretty smart), so ADCD isn’t 100% to blame.
• J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a huge amount of stuff for his Middle-earth Legendarium, but due to having a job, being a perfectionist, and also a bit of this trope he only managed to publish The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during his lifetime. For everything he left, see The History of Middle-earth and the other posthumous works. To give you an idea of how much he left, his son Christopher continued to publish collected and edited versions of his notes on a periodic basis, decades after his death.
• The Russian author Vera Kamsha switched to the Gleams of Aeterna cycle just before the final duology of the Arcia Chronicles, stating that the latter will be finished after the final part of the former is released. Then, after publishing the penultimate Aeterna book, she turned her attention to a standalone novel written jointly with Nick Perumov.
• David Gerrold's A Method for Madness, the fifth of a planned seven books in The War Against the Chtorr series, has been in Development Hell longer than Duke Nukem Forever.
• Norwegian poet/lobbyist/activist/playwright (and whatnot) Henrik Wergeland was famous for this. He had almost three things going at the same time, writing poems with one hand, political pamphlets with the other hand while writing plays with his feet, while riding around helping people and getting himself tangled into legal fights. Even his deathbed didn´t stop him. Oh, and did we forget he managed to handle a steady job, while doing all the other things? His last poem was taken down only days before he finally expired.
• Kazuma Kamachi, better known to his fans as Kamachi.exe, works on so many new novels while updating his current long-running projects per month that he jokes he'll die if he doesn't find something to write about.
• Sarah J. Maas. Midway through writing Throne of Glass (2012 - 2018), Maas began co-writing The Starkillers Cycle (which was abandoned by 2017) and started work on another series, A Court of Thorns and Roses. And then immediately after finishing Throne of Glass in 2018, she began writing the Crescent City series alongside ACOTAR. The same year the last To G book came out she also published Catwoman: Soulstealer; in 2018 she in fact released three books and Kingdom of Ashes and A Court of Wings and Ruin aren't short books either.
• Brandon Sanderson is simultaneously an extreme case of this and a downplayed case, as he maintains a massive number of projects at any one time but generally manages to avert Schedule Slip or any loss of quality to his works. Just in The Cosmere 'verse he's got, as of this writing in February 2019, at least seven more Mistborn and six more The Stormlight Archive novels planned (and multiple novellas following side characters in between) with an unknown number of Elantris sequels and at least one Warbreaker sequel planned as well, and those are just the series with at least one published novel. However, he writes at a staggering pace, with 20 novels published since Elantris came out in 2005. Somehow, between all of that, he's managed to find time to finish The Wheel of Time and participate extensively in various New Media ventures. It is possible that he is a time traveller, or else that he does not need to sleep.
  • When the topic comes up at signings and interviews, he states that this is part of how his muse works. If he works too long on any one project, he starts to burn out and has to recharge by working on something completely different. So the reason he can produce so quickly is precisely because he is always changing projects.
• Virginia Vail's Animal Inn series had a gap of almost two years between books 6 and 7, brought on in part by Vail working on the six-book Horse Crazy series (released over 1989) instead.
• Seanan McGuire is working on several series at once, managing to release at least one book per year of October Daye, InCryptid, and Wayward Children since 2016, plus various standalone novels, short stories (she releases at least one short story monthly on Patreon, whether in one of her established universes or a standalone), novels from her other series like Ghost Roads, and horror fiction under the pen name Mira Grant. According to her Patreon, she's released an average of five books a year since 2009. And these aren't short novels either. She also writes for Marvel Comics.
• Partially subverted by K. A. Applegate, who turned over most of the work of writing Animorphs to ghostwriters so she could focus on Everworld (at one point, Scholastic was publishing one Animorphs book every month, plus one Megamorphs special edition and one "Chronicles" book each year, both of which were not ghostwritten).^note This is the same thing she did with the Making Out series, which started being ghostwritten around the time Animorphs started. Ironically, Animorphs is what she's best known for, while few people have even heard of Everworld. She also started writing Remnants at the same time as Everworld, right after Animorphs ended, and currently is writing longer novels that are published once a year per series.

Live-Action TV

• As noted, Joss Whedon. Besides running Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel at the same time, had various other pokers in the fire, including trying to start up Firefly.
• Bobby Flay has multiple shows on Food Network. He also regularly guest-stars on other Food Network shows. He's also constantly opening new restaurants. He's also the food correspondent on the CBS Early Morning Show. When he finds time to sleep is anyone's guess... perhaps he simply draws his power from the rage of the semi-inexplicable Hatedom he's acquired.
• The page image concerns J. J. Abrams, who is often referenced as an example of a producer who comes up with some of the best ideas for projects, regardless of what medium it's in... and then skipping out soon after it airs to try his hand at something new. Abrams started Lost while Alias was still running. He co-produced the short-lived series What About Brian and directed Mission: Impossible III while still on Lost. The year after that, he worked on multiple projects at once, including Cloverfield, Star Trek (2009) and Fringe. At any one time, he's helming both a film and television series, and often has multiple works listed on his IMDB page.
• While it probably will never be authoritatively confirmed or denied, some theorize that HBO ended Deadwood not so much because they wanted to cancel the show, but because creator David Milch got bored with it. Under this theory, Milch instead wanted to do his pet project, the "Surfing Jesus" drama John from Cincinnati, also for HBO, and the network decided that it would be better to let Milch create a new hit show than continue Deadwood if his heart wasn't in it. (The "new hit show" part didn't work out so well. John was canceled the day after the last episode of the first season aired.)
  • Though HBO makes it sounds like this was the case Milch has denied it pretty emphatically in interviews and has made it clear that he very much wished to do Season 4 of Deadwood.
• Before J. J. Abrams, there was Glen A Larson - he often had multiple shows on air in the '70s and '80s (most notably with The Fall Guy and Knight Rider running concurrently in the 1980s), but he generally left his shows early on to launch new projects, not always of his own volition.
• Chris Carter of The X-Files fame ran four shows in the late 90's and early 2000's. The X-Files was by far the most successful, but he also had Millennium (1996), The Lone Gunmen, and Harsh Realm, the latter two not even running a full season.
• Stephen J. Cannell had numerous shows on the air at once through the '80s (example: The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormick and Riptide ^note and Hunter, but he didn't create that one all ran in the 1984-85 season), somewhat less so in the '90s.
• Aaron Sorkin. Not only was he a playwright in The '90s, he was also writing film scripts (and re-writing others, sometimes without credit), adapting his own plays, and then he decided to take a break by writing two TV shows simultaneously. Of course, he was later busted for cocaine possession, which may or may not explain how he was able to write both the first season of The West Wing and the second season of Sports Night in one year. He seems to have slowed down somewhat since leaving The West Wing. Whether or not the second season of Sports Night would have been better if Sorkin hadn't been suffering ADCD is anyone's guess, as the ADCD may well have been the byproduct of being Screwed by the Network.
• Jack Webb usually had two or three shows on the air at once, and was often trying to pitch more that were either new concepts or spinoffs/sister series of his previous shows.
• Masi Oka has become rather prolific as he's aged. In addition to appearing as Max on Hawaii Five-0, he also co-wrote the pilot of The Correctors for Syfy, is the producer of a series called ESL (both of which apparently sit on The Shelf of Movie Languishment) and a live-action Death Note (2017) adaptation (which he also has a part in, in addition to producing), wrote the concept for The Defenders (which also seems to be stuck in Development Hell), works with The Second City to bring Stand-Up Comedy to Japan (and occasionally works as a guest teacher as well as consultant/patron), consults for Japanese start-up companies on how to appeal to international markets, and he's the head of Mobius Digital, the game company he started when he couldn't get someone to work on his project ideas (so far, Mobius has only announced one project at a time, but no one knows if that's Oka's doing or if the kids he hired are just like, "Dude, boss, we can't bend space-time to get more than one thing done at once!"). These confirmed projects alone would deprive him of all opportunities for sleep, but there are also rumors he writes romance novels; it's unknown if he's ever released one, but if he has, it's under a pen name.
• Ryan Murphy launched Glee while Nip/Tuck was still on the air, launched American Horror Story and The New Normal while Glee was still on the air, and launched Scream Queens (2015) and American Crime Story while American Horror Story was still on the air (though to be fair, his involvement in American Crime Story is fairly minor compared to the others). It's often joked among fans of his shows that quality typically declines precipitously the moment his attention is drawn to a new project.
• Doctor Who:
  • Russell T Davies found himself overseeing not only the main series, but its spin-offs, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • Steven Moffat found himself overseeing this show and Sherlock, as well as contributing to The Adventures Of Tintin. He later admitted that in hindsight, this was probably a mistake, as he would feel over-worked and the story arc to season six (which he freely admitted was a nightmare) to suffered as a result.

Music

• The Beatles, as represented by Apple Corp. since the late 1980s. There are numerous Beatles projects, and it is hard to know which ones will come out when.
  • Paul McCartney as solo artist has also done this quite a bit, for various reasons, and all variants.
• Damon Goddamn Albarn. Blur, Gorillaz, Mali Music, The Good, the Bad & the Queen...
  • Not to mention that after leaving Gorillaz fans waiting five years for a follow up to Demon Days and finally releasing Plastic Beach in 2010, he then released The Fall as an official Gorillaz LP only 9 months later.
    • And since Demon Days goes on saying he's done with Gorillaz and wants to do something else. Then he decides he rather likes it after all and makes more Gorillaz material.
  • In 2012 he's released a Gorillaz single, made an Elizabethan opera album, released a funk album with Flea and Tony Allen and produced Bobby Womack. He's about to do some dates with Blur, too. When does he sleep?
• Robert Pollard makes Damon Albarn look like a wannabe.
• Dave Grohl. Take a quick look at his page and count the number of musical projects he's been involved in. And that's not even counting his stint moonlighting as a documentary film director.
• Zak Starkey was with The Who and Oasis at the same time. He has since left the latter.
• Devin Townsend is best known for his Extreme Industrial Metal band Strapping Young Lad, but is also credited with the following:
  • Several albums just under his own name;
  • Punky Brüster, a parody of selling out, based around a Death Metal band becoming Punk;
  • Ocean Machine, a relatively low key Progressive Rock project;
  • He is occasionally a producer for others (since he does so much for his own albums), the most well-known being Soilwork's Natural Born Chaos;
  • The Devin Townsend Band, an eponymous Progressive Metal project;
  • Ziltoid the Omniscient, a sort of Rock Opera based around an alien who tries to destroy the Earth because the humans failed to bring him a perfect cup of coffee. But it turns out it's all in a coffee shop employee's dreams;
  • Guest vocals and general collaborations with who knows how many bands(mostly Progressive, of course), including Ayreon and Gojira, and having Chuck Billy of Thrash legends Testament perform as the Planet Smasher during a live performance of the aforementioned Ziltoid;
  • Performing vocals on Steve Vai's Sex & Religion album;
  • His latest endeavour, The Devin Townsend Project, which is a poppy take on his normal Progressive Metal leanings, but leans towards the extreme as of the album ''Deconstruct''.
• J.G. Thirlwell, best known for his work as Foetus and on The Venture Brothers soundtrack, has also been the primary member or major collaborator of:
  • Manorexia
  • Wiseblood
  • Steroid Maximus
  • The Immaculate Consumptive
  • Baby Zizanie
  • Hydroze Plus
  • Come
  • Freq_Out
    • Nearly all of which vary greatly in musical style, even within themselves.
• Mike Patton is best known for fronting Faith No More, but also started Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, Peeping Tom, Tomahawk, Dead Cross, and probably several other bands. Aside from all those, he frequently works with John Zorn, has recorded numerous one-off collaborations with various others, and occasionally releases albums under his own name, to say nothing of the countless guest appearances for artists all across the musical spectrum. (He also provided the snarls for both the Anger Sphere in Portal and Left 4 Dead's zombies, but that probably didn't take too much time...)
  • He also did voice work for the The Darkness and Bionic Commando, and scored the second Crank film and the short film A Perfect Place.
• Arjen Anthony Lucassen, best known as the man behind Ayreon, takes part in a great many musical projects that all coincide in some way, either in similar style or playing one another's songs when in concert. The last two Ayreon albums have had four year gaps between them and the previous one.
• Jorne Lande projects are plagued with this trope, since 2000 he's released 24 albums. That's just counting albums where he has a writing credit, not his frequent guest spots on fellow deficit disorder creators Arjen Lucassen & Tobias Sammet's projects. He's also seemingly quick to leave side projects (twice now Masterplan have carried on without him) only his I Am the Band main project seems to get his full attention.
• An old joke on metal message boards was that if Phil Anselmo announces a new project, someone would usually reply "Can't wait for the first and final album!"
• Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Moonface, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, and Fifths of Seven.
• Maynard James Keenan.
  • tool: the longest runner, founded in 1990, five studio albums, one EP and a live album.
  • A Perfect Circle: founded in 1999 together with Billy Howerdel, released three albums between 2000 and 2004, fourth album released in 2018.
  • Puscifer: founded in 2003 effectively as Keenan's solo project, he's released four studio albums plus an assortment of remix albums, live albums and EPs.
  • Tapeworm: with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Danny Lohner of NIN and A Perfect Circle. Disbanded in 2004 without releasing an album.
• Dante DeCaro has been solo, with Johnny and the Moon, in Hot Hot Heat and a member of Wolf Parade, among other projects.
• Jon Foreman from Switchfoot is currently juggling his role as lead singer/songwriter for the band with the side project Fiction Family, and at some point in between all that, he founded time to release four EPs as a solo artist. The two year-period between late 2007 and late 2009 saw the release of at least fifty songs between these three projects.
• Les Claypool of Primus moonlights in Oysterhead (with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio and drummer Stewart Copeland of The Police), Les Claypool's Holy Mackerel, drums in the fictionalized jam band Electric Apricot and does solo albums. He also formed Sausage and Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains (with guitarist Buckethead, keyboardist Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic and drummer Brain), as well as The Lennon Claypool Delirium with Sean Lennon, and occasionally produces acts. As if all of this wasn't enough, he shows up as a session musician on about ten albums a year, often uncredited.
• Country Music singer Ashley Monroe. She's a solo artist. Now she's working with the Raconteurs. Now she's writing songs for other people. Now she's in the Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. Now she's solo again. Now she's recording a song with Train. Make up your mind!
• Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Because of his reputation as a bassist, he is constantly in demand to play on other people's records, to the point where he's almost as known for his session work as for the band.
• Trent Reznor has got to this point, what with running two bands (the long-running Nine Inch Nails and the newly formed How to Destroy Angels), writing film soundtracks for David Fincher, developing a mini-series based on one of his albums and being offered directorial jobs.
• Ennio Morricone in the 1960's would average over twenty film scores a year. Even though he's done fewer scores each year since then, he still kept himself busy with conducting and concert projects (even in his eighties).
• Phil Collins was well known for this (especially in The '80s), as a solo artist, member of Genesis and fusion band Brand X, on-call drummer for Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel and Robert Plant, and with his various appearances as a session drummer/producer. This is not counting his work as house drummer for the Prince's Trust concerts, his appearances in Live Aid, Knebworth '90, The Secret Policeman shows and the Concert For Montserrat, or for that matter his acting and voice acting work (and the occasional Disney soundtrack later on). The Critical Backlash his career suffered from may have had as much to do with his ubiquity as anything. Live Aid in particular saw him appear (via Concorde!) in both Philadelphia and London, doing his own set as well as guest-drumming for Eric Clapton and the reunited Led Zeppelin. In a documentary about Genesis, Collins stated that in hindsight it wasn't any wonder why the backlash occurred — he was freakin' everywhere.
• Lil Wayne was this for a while. Moreso during the period of 2007-08, he was seen as a workhorse in the hip-hop genre, dropping guest verses on a lot of projects with various hip-hop artists and even certain non-hip-hop acts. This Wolverine Publicity is what caused his Tha Carter III album to be pushed back relentlessly, to high anticipation. During that time, he also dropped several mixtapes, including a prelude to the aforementioned album called The Leak. Fast-forward to last year, before Tha Carter IV was released(which was also pushed back quite a bit), he hinted that it might be his last album. Only when the album dropped that he started mentioning future possible albums such as a sequel to Rebirth, a sequel to I Am Not a Human Being and probably one or two more projects.
• John Debney and Alexandre Desplat are ridiculously prolific film composers.
• Buckethead releases more than one solo studio album almost every year, and in addition has been in Guns N' Roses, Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains (with Les Claypool), the Deli Creeps, and Giant Robot, along with under the alternate name Death Cube K; not to mention the release of In Search of The..., a thirteen disc compilation of whatever he felt like recording that day.
• Josh Homme, anyone? His most prominent role is probably Queens of the Stone Age, but he has several side projects which include The Desert Sessions, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures and Fiffteeners.
• Bone Thugs-n-Harmony: Has a TONE of side projects starting with Mo'Thugs, The Desperadoes, Thug Line, Kneight Riduz, Bone Brothers, Harmony Howse Ent, Flesh N Bone Inc., The 7th Sign, collab albums (one possibly with the dog pound). The List goes on and on.
• Like Bone, Three 6 Mafia is no stranger to this. There's hell of a lot of spin off groups, which is waaaay too many to name.
• Emilie Autumn is prone to this. She has a tendency to work on numerous side projects at once (although many of which rarely materialize). Projects from before her Creator Breakdown, like the Jane Brooks Project or Ravensong, are probably never going to see the light of day.
• Zach Hill of the noise-rock group Hella and the experimental hip-hop group Death Grips is also an (occasionally auxiliary) member of numerous other experimental groups, namely Wavves, Team Sleep, CHLL PLL, bygones, Scars on Broadway, Nervous Cop, Flössin, Goon Moon, Holy Smokes, and Crime in Choir, as well as drumming for Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Marnie Stern, Robby Moncrieff, and Mick Barr, and releasing solo material.
• Scott "Wino" Weinrich of Saint Vitus fame. Besides his time in the classic doom metal band, Wino also contends with other doom/stoner metal bands such as War Horse, The Obsessed, Mentors, Lost Breed, Spirit Caravan, Place of Skulls, The Hidden Hand, Shrinebuilder, Probot, and Premonition 13. All of this without ever achieving commercial success (it's doom metal, what did you expect)
• Drummer Mike Portnoy, provider of the page quote, is...shall we say a busy man, and even his ouster from Dream Theater and Avenged Sevenfold have focused him only slightly - he still has Transatlantic among prog groups, the eclectic Flying Colors, and the straightforward Winery Dogs Hard Rock trio - whose bassist, Billy Sheehan, is no slouch here either.
• Rogga Johansson has, over the years, either helmed or been a part of 26 different bands. The vast majority of them have been studio-only projects, but his approach to it seems to boil down to "find a few musicians who love old-school Swedish death metal, hang out and get drunk as fuck, form a band, release an album".
• Dan Swanö has, since 1988, been a part of 29 different bands (though many of them are studio-only projects). And that's not counting the vast number of releases which he has produced or appeared as a guest musician on.
• Florian "Morean" Maier, in addition to being a classical composer, has:
  • Dark Fortress (progressive/melodic black metal)
  • Alkaloid (progressive death metal)
  • Noneuclid (progressive/avant-garde thrash metal)
  • The Hungry Gods (avant-garde modern classical ensemble)
• Davide "BrutalDave" Billia played drums for SIX separate bands at one point and still drums for four:
  • Hour of Penance (which he just joined)
  • Beheaded
  • Xenomorphic Contamination
  • Antropofagus
  • Septycal Gorge (no longer a member because they effectively can't play live at all)
  • Putridity (no longer a member due to serious personality conflicts with several other members)
• Phil Tougas currently heads or plays for nine different bands, though only four of them^note First Fragment, Zealotry, Chthe'ilist, and Funebrarum play shows, and of those, only one of them tours and the other three play less than ten shows per year:
  • First Fragment
  • Zealotry
  • Chthe'ilist
  • Serocs
  • Atramentus
  • Equipoise
  • Funebrarum
  • Cosmic Atrophy
  • Eternity's End
• Soundgarden reunited in 2010, but everything they did until Chris Cornell's untimely death seven years later had to work around whatever the bandmembers get themselves involved with - most notably Cornell's solo career and the fact Matt Cameron also drums for Pearl Jam (the band even had to bring another drummer for their 2014 concerts as Cameron would not leave Pearl Jam's tour).
• Steven Wilson, in between Porcupine Tree, No-Man, Blackfield, Bass Communion, Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, his solo career, and several other projects, also finds time to remix and remaster classic albums (mostly Progressive Rock, but some in various other genres as well) at a staggering pace. He manages to avoid Schedule Slip with most of them, although the remixes of Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans and Tears for Fears' The Seeds of Love took much longer than usual to be completed. However, that's perfectly understandable in the latter case, given that the first time around it reportedly took about six weeks just to mix the sort-of title track. Between all his original projects he's got over forty full-length releases to his credit, plus around as many remixes. This is in fewer than thirty years, mind you; the first Porcupine Tree release was in 1991. And he only started doing the remixes in 2009.
• Kevin MacLeod is the most billed composer of all time, having composed thousands of pieces of royalty-free library music. He is a busy man.
• How about Prince? It's very well known in the music industry that singer Prince had a vault complete with unreleased projects from full albums to videos to films to other pieces of music that spanned well over four decades at the time of his death in 2016. There's even a Wikipedia page about his unreleased projects. Prince frequently averaged at least one album per year during his solo career, while at the same time he managed and did production work for numerous bands, protegees, and side projects and recording, writing, and producing other artists' work. Additionally, he recorded music under a slew of pseudonyms which were either released or placed in the vault. And even after his death, albums consisting of Prince's unreleased work continue to be issued.
• Hans Zimmer got so busy with Wonder Woman 1984, Hillbilly Elegy, No Time to Die, Dune, Army of Thieves, Top Gun: Maverick, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run and The Boss Baby: Family Business that he couldn't find time to compose for Tenet with his usual directing partner Christopher Nolan.
• Founding Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo has become notoriously prolific in later years, having played for Suicidal Tendencies, Testament, Mr. Bungle, and The Misfits after his departure from Slayer, and those are just the ones where he was considered an official band member!
• Notoriously prolific hard rock/heavy metal bassist Rudy Sarzo got his start with Quiet Riot, but has also played with Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Blue Öyster Cult, Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, Dio, and The Guess Who. He has since rejoined Quiet Riot.

Pro Wrestling

• Brock Lesnar. He's gone from NCAA Wrestling, to pro wrestling, to football, back to pro wrestling in Japan this time, to MMA, back to pro wrestling, and then back to MMA. His issue isn't so much with getting bored, more that he goes where the money is.

Softwares

• One of the most annoying parts (annoying does not equal destructive) about working with the open-source crowd is how often this disorder surfaces when you have enough loosely-knit people working in the project. Sometimes one or more of the contributors don't like how the project is dealing with a particular problem, and said contributors then make a derivative (called 'fork') in which he can do things his way. If said contributors are particularly well-respected (or just plain defensive), this can result in the organization that is the umbrella of the project having to support two barely differentiable sets of software.
• Related to the above: many software projects are no longer maintained because their creators lost interest at some point, and frequently didn't bother to appoint new maintainers. If you're lucky, someone will eventually take up this role by forking the original project.

Video Games

• Video game designer Suda51 of Grasshopper Manufacture had suffered from this, at one point collaborating with Hideo Kojima on a Snatcher radio show, developing Shadows of the Damned and Liberation Maiden, and porting The Silver Case and The 25th Ward to the Nintendo DS at the same time.
• The high-definition remakes of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 were so riddled with bugs, glitches and graphical issues that, for a time, Amazon refused to sell it in light of the fan outrage. Silent Hill: Downpour came out almost at the same time, and two other Silent Hill projects were in the works as well, leading many to believe that the creative teams involved were producing unrefined products due to being overloaded, though each project did have different teams.
• Go to a indie game design forum and be enlightened.
  • Wolfire (makers of Lugaru) and Datarealms happily avoid this trope. Otherwise they'd never get anywhere, since their projects are so ambitious.
• Interactive Fiction authors suffer from this big time. Even the offer of up to $100 cash has not induced any Intro Comp authors to ever finish their games.
• Valve didn't formerly provide the page picture for nothing: For the past few years they've been so busy churning out offshoot projects like Portal and Left 4 Dead, along with their own full-length sequels and commercial releases of past game mods like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, that their original big franchise, Half-Life, hadn't seen a new release in over a decade^note until the release of Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020, with Half-Life 2: Episode 3 being seemingly eternally stuck in Valve-time limbo (a term taken right out of Blizzard's lexicon, coined for their own "when it's done" release schedule).
• It was for this reason that the Loom series was left unfinished, closely related to the fact that people had lost interest in making games with serious subject matter, as they weren't as funny/successful as the other things LucasArts were working on at the time.
• Square Enix are starting to become infamous for announcing a million-and-a-half games all at once.
  • This resulted in Kingdom Hearts III being repeatedly pushed back in development (with a prequel, interquel, and various remakes and Final Mix rereleases to satiate fans until the required time for development to begin, with only one sequel involving the main characters between those.
  • Part of the problem was that the timeline for KHIII to even really begin development started at "whenever Final Fantasy Versus XIII is finished" - the problem there that it was unveiled in 2006 as part of the "Fabula Nova Crystallis" side-series and came out in 2016 as Final Fantasy XV.
• The Elder Scrolls main series has seemingly fallen victim to Bethesda's ADD in this regard. Since Skyrim was released in 2011, Bethesda has developed, produced, and/or published three Elder Scrolls spin-off titles (Online, Legends and Blades), Fallout 4, the Dishonored series, a new Wolfenstein series, The Evil Within series, Doom (2016), Prey (2017), and Fallout 76. Rumors continue to swirl of yet another major production which has been clearly stated to not be TES:VI (eventually revealed to be Starfield). Finally, at E3 2018, The Elder Scrolls VI was announced...vaguely. It is stated to be in pre-production and will not be released until after Starfield. Educated estimates put the release date somewhere in the mid-2020s.
• Despacit has made several mods for Prestige Tree, with one of them being a collaboration with the original game's creator. However, as stated on this list, the problem is that he abandons them quickly as well.
• David Szymanski of DUSK fame is supposed to work on Gloomwood, which saw its Early Access release in 2022... and within the same year he took his time to develop and release Iron Lung and Chop Goblins.

Webcomics

• A common problem on sites that host webcomics without the need for running one's own website, like ComicFury, is that it's exceptionally easy for a given artist to start a new project the moment the idea comes to mind. While users subscribe to individual comics, not creators, it's hardly uncommon to see creators raging about how people are interested in the "wrong" project at a given time.
  • This can lead to Creator Backlash when webcomic authors get tired of their new magnum opus getting minimal attention and their old disliked project has a vocal fanbase.
• Michael Prokop's main project is his magnum opus, Starship Moonhawk, which at one point had two spin-offs (Cosmic Feline and Space Destroyer Hunter) and a planned roleplay forum, all of which save said main comic got canned or put on the backburner. That freed him up to work on his adult comics, Peppermint Saga (and its non-canon spin-off, Blue-Grey Rhapsody) and Ship in a Bottle. He also does website work for Salient Caligation, has one called The Lavenders in the works and does commissioned pieces. Combined with retcons, a slight attitude and just plain old bad luck, it can feel very rare to see anything of his updated consistently for more than a month.
• Furry/Manga artist Gillpanda suffers from this trope, he has more than 15 mangas/doujinshis (plus other projects) and none of them was finished (commissions doesn't count). His more recently project "Affinity" probably will get canceled or put in Development Hell after the Vol. 2, but, after all... there is always hope.
• Randy Milholland. The Something*Positive front page alone had at one point five differently-titled comics on it, and that's not counting at least one that he just allowed to trail off without resolution.
• Despite having an already tremendously behind schedule main comic in VG Cats, Scott Ramsoomair also has a Pokémon comic and does the official Final Fantasy XI webcomic. ... Both of which were eventually orphaned.
• Kris Straub, man. Just Kris Straub. In addition to various musical side projects, one-offs for posters and t-shirts, being one of the four Webcomics Weekly panelists, and sometimes having a day job...
  • He used to do Checkerboard Nightmare 3 days a week. Then, he started doing Starslip Crisis every weekday and Checkerboard Nightmare ceased regular updates a few months later.
  • He started the Starslip side project "Alterverse War," a Massive Multiplayer Crossover involving any sci-fi webcomic that wanted to participate, but has put it on hold indefinitely.
  • Some years later, Starslip Extra started, a simple gag strip that ran once a week, trying to recapture the earlier flavor before Starslip got bogged down in plot. Around the same time, Straub launched another comic, chainsawsuit, originally updating 3 days a week.
    • A few months later, he started yet another comic, F Chords, running two days a week, and very soon upgraded chainsawsuit to daily and F Chords to three days a week, bringing his total to 13 strips each week, along with video commentary on reruns of Checkerboard. That only lasted a few months, with F Chords put on hiatus for two years and the commentary indefinitely.
  • Around the time he moved into the Penny Arcade offices, he restarted Blamimations with Scott Kurtz for PATV.
  • F Chords was reborn in 2011 with the intent to repurpose it into an office comedy, but within a few months, he realized that, since he changed his mind about ending Starslip, was still running chainsawsuit, and not only doing Blamimations season 2 but adding a live action Kris and Scott/Scott and Kris show to PATV (not to mention getting married), he had to put it back on hiatus directly after the first story arc.
• Bleedman has three different webcomics running. It's hard to tell his pattern of updates; at times one will have more focus than his other two, or two will have more focus than the remaining one. Back when he only had two, he put one on hiatus to get the third one up and running.
• Wicked Hatter of Skewed Reality. And Angry Hatter's Happy House. And I Was Your Dog. And Kalten. And....
• Bryon "Psyguy" Beaubien of That's My Sonic fame suffers from this like no one else. Look, he's working on a sprite comic! Oh, wait, that's boring him, here are some videos! Oh, that's too much work, have a hand drawn comic instead! Sorry, he dumped that comic, look, he gave some other artist this new script! Whee!
  • One of those "other artists", Alan Solivan, aka Mr. O.M.A, is also a victim of ADCD—one look at his atrociously long to-do list makes that pretty evident, and the work just keeps piling on.
  • It seems that his new webcomic GG-Guys has somewhat cured him of this, as now his only projects are that, Wha-Chow (a podcast), and the occasional script to give to someone else.
  • There was also a chatroom Psyguy "ran" about a decade ago - Psycho's Sonic Chat, hosted on beseen. He eventually abandoned it completely, and let it sit unmanaged to the day beseen shut down. Currently unknown if this was due to other projects, or simply becoming disillusioned as to how great it was to have his own Sonic the Hedgehog chatroom.
  • It hasn't gotten any better now that he's BitPolar. He tends to have a ridiculous amount of Lets Plays running simultaneously, and that's not even getting into the many one shots.
• David Morgan-Mar. Irregular Webcomic!, Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, Darths & Droids, mezzacotta, and Square Root of Minus Garfield ... And oddly free of Schedule Slip problems.
  • Though Darths & Droids and mezzacotta are work of DMM and his friends, and he's only coordinator in Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, which actually are worked on by other collaborators. It also helps that Mezzacotta is largely automated, and Square Root of Minus Garfield is user-submitted.
  • Irregular Webcomic! has now technically ended, but because DMM apparently hates having free time, it's been replaced by giant weekly blog posts, as well as daily "reruns" of old strips which often have lengthy new comments tacked onto them.
• Shivae Studios. Four actively running, another five on planned hiatus, and some cycling in and out.
  • Shivae Studios is the home of The Cyantian Chronicles, Alien Dice, and many more.
• Invoked when the Machine of Death project was first proposed:
  Do it, Ryan. Do it! Abandon all your other projects and write this anthology!
• Owen Dunne of You Damn Kid fame at one point had five simultaneous comics, only two of which ever saw an ending.
• Andy Weir juggled Casey and Andy with a side project, Cheshire Crossing. The former reached its conclusion (at strip #666) and one storyline of CC seems to be complete but ended on a Sequel Hook. He then went off and wrote The Martian, his wildly successful first novel, and the basis of the movie by Ridley Scott.
• For a time, artist Jin Wicked attempted to keep two webcomics, Crap I Drew On My Lunchbreak and Asylum on 5th Street going simultaneously while also doing commissions and other work. It eventually led to a literal Creator Breakdown. Both these strips are now ended (and in the case of Asylum, the archives completely purged).
• Isabel Marks currently has two comics, Namir Deiter and You Say It First, which update between five and seven days a week. For most of the past five years, she's had a third webcomic (Spare Parts, Undoubtedly Kawaii, The Shokora Diaries, Dealing With It, Grover Hills, and a few others). She also colors Kevin & Kell and does even more comics for a bonus site for donors. As of August 2009, her total is over 10 series and over 6000 webcomics.
• Brian Clevinger: He had been working on 8-Bit Theater regular for the greater part of a decade, and since then he's written a novel (Nuklear Age), tried to write a sequel to it, is currently writing and doing various other jobs on a published comic (Atomic Robo), and has recently started writing for two other webcomics simultaneously, and of all of these only Warbot in Accounting has run into any severe Schedule Slip (which is more because of the artist than him). 8-Bit has had some schedule slip, but that is almost always caused by things such as hurricanes, and he apparently learnt from the experience, as 8-Bit is the only comic which is not written ahead of time.
  • Now he's finished 8-Bit. But the number of projects is still huge (the three webcomics and Atomic Robo, comics for Marvel...).
• Benny Reyes has this problem, his comics include Magiversity, Zephyr The Lost Battle Fortress, Hypershooter, Astronomolies, & the adult comics Pr0nCrest, B4 Pr0nCrest, Sexy Bouncin' Oppai Troopers & the collaborative effort Pr0nCrest Alt-Again & he has plans for, at least, one other comic.
• J. X. Gans has GansWorks (which shows off a number of aborted comics), PostHuman, The Bees Knees, Power Trip, Misfits Of Mischief the adult comic Stella & Celeste as well as a couple of accounts he created, then deleted.
• Keith Alan Morgan created The KA Mics to get around his problem of writing & drawing the same characters over & over & over again & allowing him to bounce from series to series while still (mostly) keeping to his update schedule.
• Brian Carroll of Instant Classic fame usually has eight or so projects going at once (which he regularly makes fun of using the marquee on his site). Past projects have included a comic called Trumpet Airlines that only featured three or so strips, GRAMPAA (a site against the MPAA), Studio Litchfield (a spinoff of Instant Classic), The Millatreuese Project (a series of short quick one-person films), and several independent film ventures. Currently he's producing Instant Classic, Genrezvous Point, the Instant Classic Editorial, The Rapscallions (a reboot of his earlier comic Pirates), a journal comic called F-Stop Blues, and a feature film. At least Carroll acknowledges it.
• Bill Holbrook manages to keep three comics (Kevin & Kell, Safe Havens, and On the Fastrack) going simultaneously, the latter two being syndicated. Unusually for this trope, he seems nearly immune to Schedule Slip.
  • As these comics are all newspaper-style, it could be argued that the art, at least, is less time-consuming than it might otherwise be; each strip consists of a few panels, often using talking heads, simple/reused poses, and other shortcuts, and someone else does the coloring. On the other hand, a comic must be written before it can be drawn, and the time involved in conceiving, writing, and polishing the scripts for so many comics per week is considerable; Holbrook estimates that the writing accounts for three-quarters of his workload.
• A common criticism of Piro of Megatokyo fame — he might be too busy to update his "day job" more than 2-3 times a month, he might not have time to work on the cast page, he might miss so many deadlines that he's quite literally helped put one manga publisher out of business... but he has time to go to every anime convention in the US, spend 6-8 hours on a "dead piro day" strip here or there or post blog rants about his favorite anime, anime merch, and MMORPGs.
  • Later on, he became an aversion. Due to his wife's illness and having a kid, Piro has often excused his situation with dealing with both of those, and has all but shut himself in for the most part. He only resurfaced in the con scene in 2012 after a two-year absence, and even then it was cons that were a day's driving distance or so away from his hometown in southern Michigan. As of 2022, he has taken a day job as a bus driver to pay for his family members' healthcare costs plus other expenses. Megatokyo is unfortunately no longer his day job.
• David Herbert is not only the writer of Living with Insanity but also writes Gemini Storm and it was recently announced he would be starting a new comic, with Michael Chick of The Author which Herbert has taken over writing duties for. He manages it by writing months before the due deadline.
  • He just released a new webcomic, Domain Tnemrot, and another print comic, Just Another Day and he and the JAD artist are working on something else as well. And on his facebook he mentions working on three other projects he hasn't mentioned yet. Apparently he doesn't sleep.
  • And he just started a review column that's going to update twice weekly. And he's still updating everything with regularity.
• Bobby Crosby has a good half-dozen webcomics unfinished, each of which see maybe three updates in a year. These updates seem to coincide him trying to push the story to a movie or media publisher; one gets the impression they're little more than vehicles for a screenwriting career he can't seem to get off the ground. One especially cynical may wonder if his inability to keep any of his web-works on a consistent schedule might be negatively affecting these attempts.
• Nepath, creator of webcomics Energize – he's currently working on Energize, it's spin-off Saroth and another comics, Fearless, is a member of Crossoverkill creative staff, has been pretty much a head of Heroes Unite creative team and now will be it's artist. For some time Energize, Fearless and Saroth were updating in a system - two of them were on extended hiatus while he was updating another chapter of third, but currently Fealess is on extended hiatus until he'll get over with his other comics. A crossover between Energize and Dasien had remained unfinished for years but was finally completed in 2013.
• While not to extreme, humon can suffer from this from time to time. Scandinavia and the World is easily her most popular project, and she will sometimes focus on those for long periods of time, often to the chagrin to fans of her second-most-popular work Niels. Love and Tentacles fans are also very disappointed as she apparently has no ideas for it, and it has been long dormant. Occasionally SatW fans will become annoyed when she focuses on Niels or a non-comic project (like her recent fantasy species).
• City of Reality author Ian Sampson confessed to it here, after a long bout with Schedule Slip.
• Zoe Kirk-Robinson, of The Life of Nob T. Mouse (runs Monday to Friday), All Over The House (runs Monday to Friday), The Webcomic Builder (supposedly runs Mon-Wed-Fri), The Webcomics Company podcast (fortnightly), Ink Proof Cannon (apparently going to run Monday to Friday) and a vlog (supposed to update Mon-Wed-Fri). Oh and she's studying for a law degree, too.
• Adrian Ramos (most often known as "Adis"). At his peak, he was writing and drawing four webcomics at once — Count Your Sheep, The Wisdom Of Moo, No Room For Magic, and My T-Shirt Fairy Tale. Unfortunately, between these comics and Real Life commitments, any attempts at a regular schedule are quickly discarded, and the best way to follow his stuff is to just check in occasionally and hope for the best. None of the aformentioned comics have been updated since December 2011.
• At his busiest, David Willis ran Dumbing of Age (a full-colour, 7-updates-per-week comic) and Shortpacked! (a huge full-color, 3-to-5-updates-per-week comic) simultaneously, while also spewing blog posts and comments on his own comics, and presumably also maintaining his time machine. Shortpacked has since come to an end.
  I have done many webcomics, distressingly at the same time.
• Sandra and Woo's site now hosts a second webcomic, Gaia, which has the same main writer and artists.
• Platypus Comix serves home to four webcomics all written and drawn by Peter Paltridge: Mulberry, Electric Wonderland, Free Spirit (2014), and Princess Pi. Additionally, he writes humorous articles for the site every so often. On top of all that, he compiles other people's comics and stories together with his own into the publication/e-paper BANG! Magazine.
• Carlos G., author of Leth Hate, has gone though several projects with some variations of his characters: Lowroad, Giselle, Leth Hate, My Pet Succubus...
• T Campbell, from the mid-aughties through the early tens, had as many as four webcomic projects running at the same time. (It helped that he handled the writing, or co-writing, only, allowing him to avoid Schedule Slip for the most part.) On occasion he also had print projects, and a crossword website, going. Although not all of his creative endeavours have been seen through to completion, only one such case, QUILTBAG, was due to a loss of motivation on his part.

Web Original

• LittleKuriboh, creator of The Abridged Series genre, also has a webcomic that updates sporadically and two other Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series spinoffs, a video blog, regularly flies off to conventions all over the US and his native UK, and is a stage actor.
• Walrusguy's Bowser The Foodstealer trilogy suffered from this.
• Andrew Dickman.
• As noted, Joss Whedon.
• Whilst not having ADHD, David Johnson juggled with a ton of projects and scripts in the early days of

Economy Watch, but instead decided to stick to the show and writing for the next 5 or so years and make his theatrical directorial debut later.

• Arguably, Chris Bores, aka The Irate Gamer. His review series has recently gotten stagnant (a new review was once released, three months after the last one). He also focuses on two other projects: Haunted Investigators and Chris and Scottie Roadtrip.
• Bek D. Corvin, co-creator of the Whateley Universe, and author for a slew of the protagonists. She's also an author in the 'Heaven and Hell' universe and the 'Caregivers' universe and several others of her own invention, like the 'Erinyes' world. Word of God says she's dragging half a dozen of the Whateley authors into yet another sci-fi universe construct.
• Alexandra Erin's projects include serials Star Harbor Nights, Tales of MU, Tribe, Void Dogs, More Tales of MU, and The 3 Seas, as well as numerous more self-contained or episodic stories. At her peak, she was regularly updating all but the first of those serials as well as a run of stand alone stories in the Tales of MU continuity. Recently, however, she's been struggling to make roughly weekly Tales of MU chapters.
• Ross Scott of Accursed Farms fame. Not perhaps, because he has so many irons in the fire, but because he's working in a medium that requires an unholy amount of time and effort. (And he presumably has a day job as well.) Fans of Freeman's Mind who have been waiting a long time for the next installment to come out can't help but tap their feet and check their watches while they watch the Progress Chart for Civil Protection slowly inch towards completion at a glacial pace. (Again, it's a work-heavy, time-heavy medium...) While productivity has been arguably good despite the addition of Ross's Game Dungeon, it's yet another project on top of everything else he's working on.
• Shadyvox has shown shades of this. With Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The Abridged Series slowing down to a crawl, he's made two other Abridged series... none of which made it past the pilot so far.
• Spoony admitted to this on Twitter, as tweets like this indicate he's got a full plate. Mucking about with his YouTube channel (Which was giving him pains because of suspension), working through Final Fantasy XIII 's review, cons, building a PC for a friend, being active on Twitter, Counter Monkey, fixing his site when it crashes, and still trying to enjoy things like, y'know, movies on the side. No wonder he needs a haircut.
• Bob Chipman has stated that this (combined with several New England snowstorms making it impossible to shoot) was the reason why The Game Overthinker experienced so many delays in early 2013.
• PewDiePie never does just one Let's Play at a time.
• Linkara has a minor case of this. While his main show has been released on a consistent schedule, his side projects tend to move by very slowly. History of Power Rangers is known to have year-long gaps between episodes and that's not counting editing together live shows, DVDs, the occasional Let's Play, and writing Revolution of the Mask.
• At one point, Caddicarus had 8 shows spread over 3 videos a week, resulting in a chaotic shitshow of a schedule that resulted in neglected shows (especially since Retrospectives tended to take up 3 consecutive weeks), failed projects like Puppicarus and Today's Special, and stress resulting from what must have been an obscene workload. Thankfully, Caddy recognised his ADCD in time and decided to start over in February 2016, retiring Drive-Thru Reviews, Puppicarus, Tinker Time, and Caddy's Retrospectives (Today's Special was a One-Episode Wonder), though he did keep them up as an archive. Everything from the cancelled shows was consolidated into mainline Caddicarus, Top 10s,^note Caddy treats these two as one and the same and Current Quickies, a new show called Caddy's Film Fridays was added, and the Spyro Retrospectives were relegated to "future project" status and retooled as one huge video.
• Rooster Teeth has some people who seemingly get involved with every show, and then some. Probably the biggest case is Miles Luna, who was showrunner of Red vs. Blue (three years plus supervisor of an anthology season) while simultaneously writing RWBY, and then co-creating Camp Camp - with the other guy, Jordan Cwierz, being equally busy, doing the Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures, and then other 2D animations such as X-Ray & Vav, Sex Swing, and Nomad of Nowhere - while also doing Let's Plays in Backwardz Compatible, a podcast in Fan Service, and appearing in other things.
• Game Grumps is constantly bouncing around between different games, to the point where the majority of them just get abandoned and never finished. At one point Arin acknowledged this and vowed to dedicate the following February to revisiting some of the unfinished playthroughs, calling it "Finish February". This resulted in a return to exactly one game, Pokémon FireRed... which he did not actually finish, instead putting it on hiatus again until a year and a half later and starting StarTropics instead... which he also never finished.

Western Animation

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone made Team America: World Police while production of the eighth season of South Park was still ongoing. According to Parker and Stone, making the film left the pair creatively and physically exhausted when it came time to make the second batch of South Park episodes for the season, and in DVD commentary for that season, they point out several places where it is evident that they were running on fumes.
  • Similarly, the third season was done while they were making the movie. The DVD Commentary for season three has the two mentioning how busy their schedule was, especially when they were making the meteor shower trilogy. In fact, they have absolutely no memory of making "Sexual Harassment Panda" (the first episode aired after the movie's release).
  • Also possibly happening again, thanks to their award-winning musical.
• Samurai Jack abruptly ended after four seasons for exactly this reason. Genndy Tartakovsky wanted to focus on other things and intended to end it with a movie, but Cartoon Network just pulled the plug. The movie lamented in Development Hell and the death of Mako probably didn't help much either. He eventually just settled on doing a fifth season that was released thirteen years after the fourth.
• By the dawn of The New '10s, Seth MacFarlane had three prime-time shows (Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show) and a web series (Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy) to his name, two of the former carried on into his recording a music album and writing/directing/starring in two live-action films (Ted and A Million Ways to Die in the West). During the production of the second film, he also published his first book, a novelization of its screenplay. While it racked up an impressive resume that included just about every major job in show business, many of his critics have said that this puts a strain on his creativity (his three animated shows frequently cited as carbon copies of each other) and is a huge factor in Family Guy's Seasonal Rot.

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As noted, Joss Whedon.

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