This week: Deadline Planning Edited by: Jeff  
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When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you.
But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.
-- Simon Sinek
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm one of your regular editors for the Noticing Newbies Official Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 400 newsletters across the site during that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me via email or the handy feedback field at the bottom of this newsletter!  |
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Deadline Planning
I often start the month with the best of intentions. My reading goals, my writing goals, the things I want to accomplish around the house or at work ... at the beginning of the month there's endless promise and potential because I have a whole month to get all that stuff done. Then it gets busy and a week goes by, but no worries because I still have three weeks left and that's plenty of time. Before I know it, I'm down to two weeks, then one week, then a matter of days and suddenly I'm faced with either scrambling to get everything done I set out to do, or leaving some goals by the wayside.
Does anyone else struggle with this?
Procrastination can be one of the biggest impediments to actually accomplishing your goals ... or at least accomplishing your goals with the level of optimal efficiency and/or quality. When I was in school, I was very good at waiting until the last minute to get things done, but still managing to get them done anyway. This tweet kind of perfectly encapsulates what my philosophy on procrastination used to be:
As I've gotten older (and hopefully wiser, but the jury's still out on that part  ), I've found that the constant cycle of putting something off, rushing to get it done, turning it in and hoping for the best, then rinsing and repeating is not conducive to my long-term success. It's also incredibly difficult to maintain this kind of process when you don't have hard deadlines to meet, or when the work is so involved that you can't possibly rush through it all at the last-minute. It's one thing to rush to clean up your house before out-of-town guests arrive, but considerably different when you're trying to finish that novel you owe to your publisher, or that short story you want to submit to a contest with a deadline coming up later in the day.
If you have a complicated or involved project and just racing to meet the very last deadline isn't tenable, one of the things you can do is set yourself mini-deadlines to hit at regular intervals, so that you're breaking the process down into more manageable chunks. Let's use the example of a short story due for the official Writing.com contest, and you want to plan things out so that you're not racing to finish it before 11:59pm on the last day of the month.
Instead of just having it in your head (or your calendar) that something is due at the end of the month, consider giving yourself other, smaller milestones to accomplish in the meantime. Perhaps weekly goals to come up with a story one week, then a draft the next week, then revisions the following week, before a final proofread the last week. By creating smaller, more easily achievable goals at regular intervals, you can break down a large project into a more manageable set of smaller projects.
Another option if you're looking for a little less structure would be to give yourself a deadline well in advance of the actual deadline. This happens a lot at my day job, where someone will need something by a certain date, but tell the people that they need information from that the deadline is a week or more prior to their deadline. For example, "I have to deliver these final files on May 1st, so I'm going to tell everyone else that I need their input by April 15th so I have plenty of buffer in case there's a delay." If you know your official Writing.com contest entry is due by the end of the month, you can give yourself an advance deadline of, say, the 21st of the month to give yourself plenty of time to finish it, even if you go a little past your deadline.
Whether you divvy things up or build in a buffer to account for unexpected delays, reorienting your thinking to get out ahead of a deadline is one very effective way to avoid only tracking the absolute latest point at which you can complete a task, then rushing to get everything done at the last minute.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
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Contests & Activities: April 26, 2023 Issue [#11934]
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