10AugDeadlines – who needs ‘em?!?

It’s Tuesday lunchtime and I’m waiting for a client to send me the information I need to write an 8-10 page A4 brochure and an A5 flyer for them by the end of the week.  Not too bad, on the face of it: that leaves me three and a half days to write them, doesn’t it? 

Well, no – I also have a part-time job at a tourist attraction during the summer (I officially left last October, but they get lots of Italian tourists and I speak Italian, so I’m quite busy there July/August) and I’m working there tomorrow and Thursday.  By the time I come home after a day of marshalling groups of multi-national tourists and their small children around the castle, my brain is fried and I really can’t produce good copy.  Which leaves this afternoon and Friday to write it.

So I need the information now.  It was supposedly being sent on Thursday, when they commissioned me to do it.  I was away for a long weekend and expected to find it in my inbox when I got back – but no.  So I’m left twiddling my thumbs and writing blog posts while I wait for the real work to come in.  I’ll get it done by Friday night, as promised, as long as they don’t wait ’til Friday afternoon to send it (I can’t type that fast!).

I’m getting quite good at this deadline lark.  The same company that wants the brochures asked me for 11 pages of web content (including research) within three days last week.  I managed it.  I’ve never thought of myself as a fast writer, but it is coming more easily now.  In fact I think deadlines are quite good for me because I don’t have time for my usual endless editing, so I have to think more clearly and write it better first off.  And I can’t procrastinate, nor rearrange the office, do my accounts or engage in any other of my favourite work-displacement activities.

Deadlines are good.  As King Charles I said of his impending death, they ‘concentrate the mind wonderfully’.  In a way they’re teaching me my job: to get the words written and not faff about being all “artistic”.  They make me use my time efficiently, research faster, cut out the timewasting and write more tightly.

Who needs deadlines?  I do!