Professional writers of all stripes juggle multiple due dates, but you can tackle this problem by working backwards from your deadlines.
Are you struggling to complete a writing assignment? A novel? Tired of bouncing between personal writing projects, without crossing the finish line?
A few years ago, as a due date for an article closed in, I got a severe case of copy jitters.
For whatever reason, working on the final draft, I began to struggle. I lost the thread of the piece. It looked like one jumbled mess, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to complete the article on time.
Sound familiar?
When trouble shows its ugly mug, we all have tricks to keep us engaged. One of mine is to read passages from my favourite books about creativity. I’ll grab Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way Every Day, or Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act for a swift kick of encouragement.
Usually reading about writing is enough to inspire me. This time it didn’t.
Not even the engaging writing styles of Cameron and Rubin, or their barebones understanding of artists—writers, singers, sculptors, painters, quilters—could encourage me.
Against all reasoning and crunched for time, I still felt that I needed something new to quell whatever fear was behind this procrastination, so I bought Cameron’s Letters to an Artist and dove into it.
Three quarters of the way through the newly purchased book, I found this:
“If I want something completed in one year, what must then be done by nine months, six months, three months, one month, one week, today?”
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
By the way, the concept of working timelines in reverse isn’t new to project managers, but I’d learn that much later. They use this method in the planning stages of a corporate initiative, but right then, at the corner of panic and procrastination, Julia’s advice was all I knew. And it was worth a shot
I looked at my to-do list and for each piece I had on the go, I calculated how much time I needed to finish it, then tracked the number of days from finish to start.
I did this for a class assignment, blog posts, two half-finished freelance articles, résumé updates, and a manuscript in in two different editorial stages.
Broken down this way, my list was no longer overwhelming. In fact, I was energized. I was motivated to return to the keyboard.
With each item’s daily production recorded on my To Do list I had manageable chunks of work. Plus, I’d built in downtime, something I’d routinely avoided until the candle wick was burned to nubs at both ends.
In the end, I turned in all assignments on time.
The finished articles were submitted and published, as were two others. I shipped off my manuscript to an editor while continuing to write blog posts daily. I even managed to create new website content.
And the results kept coming.
By focussing on daily output instead of a big, hairy monster of a deadline, I turned my to-do list, into a “ta-dah” list. And over the next few weeks, I crossed off items with regularity.
Today, I’m well into my current daily yield and I can cross this article off the list, too.
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An earlier version of this article was published in an issue of Mississippi Crow.