I’m back – miss me?
Great week with the family members. We did a lot of day trips, one overnight trip, and plenty of restaurants, all filled with laughter, stories, and new memories.
I knew myself enough to plan some “me” time alone in front of the computer. But the weirdest thing happened – I wrote two poems in one of those hours I set aside. I don’t write poetry normally. Not because I don’t like to but because my writing is usually of the business variety.
But the minute my time was limited, I cranked out something unexpected. I’m now convinced that I work best under tight time frames. Sometimes, for me anyway, a little bit of stolen time is much more fruitful than an entire day.
How do you work best? Do longer deadlines work better for you than shorter ones? What conditions are right for you to delve into more creative areas?
4 responses to “Back to the Wall”
Depends on the project.
The more large swaths of unscheduled time I have, the more i get done.
The more structured my time is, the more resentful I get, and the less I get done.
Count me among those who are most productive under tight deadlines. Why? I tend to procrastinate, which is stupid, since whenever I push myself to do something ahead of time (like taxes) I feel so much better once its done.
Most of my editors tend to assign things with two week deadlines (sometimes even tighter). I prefer that to longer deadlines, which make it easier to procrastinate since there's no urgency to setting interviews, and transcribing can be done later. When new assignments come along, I'm backed into a corner. Okay. I backed myself into that corner. Knowing that almost always happens, I still find ways to procrastinate when I have more than a week or two to complete an assignment.
Creatively…ideas seem to strike when I don't have two spare moments, so I try to jot thoughts down for when I do have time. It's day 19 of ScriptFrenzy and I still haven't gotten to page one. But I've never been able to jump quickly in and out of my make-believe worlds like many writers can. I have to immerse myself for several hours at a time. That's impossible for me to do in short bursts.
Tight deadlines makes me cringe. I think it goes back to the days of the content mill that I worked for. If I'm stressed or tense then my creative juices can't flow well.
My best work comes in the wee hours of the morning though. I've come to like getting up at 3 or 4 a.m. It's really quiet and I can work peacefully.
I prefer tight but reasonable deadlines. Asking me to do something within the next few hours will get little more than a chuckle out of me 99% of the time. Giving me a month means I'll probably forget about your project. But when clients don't give me tight deadlines, I set them myself. For example, if they order X blog posts during a month and want them by the end of the month, I'll follow up with them with a general schedule letting them know when each will be written. That puts me in a position where now the client expects it sooner, so I get it done. Otherwise I'd push them all to the end of the month, get them done of course, but hate myself for it later.
Even for my own projects I like deadlines. That's one of the reasons I let my blog readers follow along with some of them — it keeps me accountable and makes me feel like someone's counting on me hitting that deadline to see how it was done. Without having to answer to someone I can slack off like few others. Well, not slack off so much as get distracted w/ other projects.