Time is made up of deadlines. I’ve been contracting with a company to write blogs and website content. I have an online spreadsheet of the copy to work on and when it’s due – the deadline. Even when you’re in school, the due date of an assignment is a deadline. If you haven’t turned it in without a good reason, the deadline is missed and there are consequences. Those are deadlines others have imposed on you.
Today I’m talking about the ones you’ve imposed on yourself. You want to get your laundry done and the house cleaned by 8 p.m. on Thursday, so you can be packed and ready Friday afternoon to enjoy your weekend trip. So you split it into smaller tasks starting on Saturday, by tackling each area of the house on a different day, and ending by finishing up the laundry and packing Thursday night. How you get it all done is up to you, as long as you have it done by Thursday at 8 p.m.
The self imposed deadline that’s now looming in my head is June 30. It’s the date I chose to have the first half of my upcoming novel self-edited and prepared to go to an outside editor. I feel like it’s mostly ready, but I know I’ll nit pick and worry right up until the 30th. It just what I do. Sometimes I get so caught up in it that I get sick of it and can’t be sure it’s “good enough” to hand over to an editor. “Dumpster Fire” is a good way to describe it from time to time.
I’m actually ahead of the game on this. Since so much of my novel was written before I really started to focus it on it this year, I’ve breezed past a number of milestones/deadlines without a thought. But this one concerns me a little, if only because I don’t let a whole lot of people read my works in progress. The ‘dead’ in ‘deadline’ looms in my head. What if it’s not good enough? What if the editor laughs in my face? What if….?
What sort of deadlines do you impose on yourself? Are they difficult to achieve? How do you go about accomplishing a multi-part task by a specific deadline? Let’s talk on Facebook!