Ever wondered what consumes a visual journalist’s day? I tracked every hour of a typical project to uncover the biggest time drains and share insights on how to speed things up.

Visual journalism is slow—at least it seems so, compared with written journalism. While many written pieces take a day or two, visual stories can easily take weeks to produce. Meanwhile the news cycle is advancing a few rounds. By tracking the time on a sample project, three time sinks can be identified that contribute to the slower pace of visual journalism: