I thought I’d expound on my exploding head blog a bit more today. See there’s more to it than the threat of my head bursting while I sit at my computer. There’s the issue of my little problem, my addiction.
I am addicted to deadlines. I don’t know exactly when this happened. I used to work for newspapers, but I don’t think that was the cause–I think it’s more what made me a good fit in the job.
And when I say I’m addicted to deadlines, I don’t just mean making them–I mean beating them. It’s sick, really it is. Here’s how it works. I set a deadline. That’s right I do, based on nothing really, just when I think something should be done–might be months before it is actually due. Then, thanks to my lovely writing program WriteWay, I plug said deadline, total estimated words of the project and any days I know I won’t be able to write into my computer. WriteWay quite nicely then spits out a word goal that I must hit each day to make my deadline. (Just in case you think WriteWay is the problem, let me fess up that back before I owned WriteWay I had built a spreadsheet of my own in Excel to do this same exact thing.)
Now this might not seem too bad. I have a goal. It’s reasonable. Gives me the security of knowing if I do that amount every day I’ll hit my deadline, right? Yeah, this is where the sick part kicks in. I find myself saying, “Hmmm. It says 1,237 words a day. And I have 34 days before the deadline SO if I wrote an extra 8,058 words (237 x 34) I could get the goal down to 1,000. Which would mean 8 days of an extra 1,000 words or so…” Because see my goal is never to make my goal, it’s to beat it, to drive it into the ground.
And thus I face the head-exploding dilemma.
Someone help me….
I’m jealous….sorry I’m no help
by Amie Stuart January 19th, 2008 at 2:27 pmI took a step today. I blocked out all weekends on my little calendar as no write days. My word count goal during the week did not surge horribly either.
by Lori January 19th, 2008 at 7:14 pmI am going to try and take at least some weekends off…I am. I only wrote a hundred or so words today and edited a little. And I don’t feel guilty…(okay a little)
I think it’s good to give ourselves time off to recharge. I spent yesterday hanging shelves in my closet. Don’t ask…it was not pleasant. I really would have rather been writing.
by Amie Stuart January 20th, 2008 at 6:33 am