I haven’t been very good about keeping my writing deadlines this summer.
Which admittedly is a little weird because although I technically only have about two of them right now, but the end of the year my goal is to have about 8-10 regularly scheduled writing gigs on my plate at a given time. It’ll be a mix of mostly monthly, but also a couple of weekly and even one daily project (this blog, in fact), but the point is, if I can’t even keep up to date on two assignments, how in the world am I going to not just absolutely drown once I bump things up five-fold in 2012?!
I kind of made a sad, but obvious observation last night when I was finally catching up a couple of embarrassingly old humor columns that I had neglected to finish from back in July. Basically, I need to be more diligent about just sitting down and working and not letting 1,000,001 distractions pull me away from actually being productive. Because the funny thing was, when I spent a good portion of yesterday morning stuck in a waiting room while my wife was at the doctor’s, I actually got a lot of stuff done! I’ve noticed the same thing when I fly on airplanes – as much as I absolutely hate the whole flying experience in general, I’m actually really productive on airplanes where I have limited internet access and other distractions, and it’s not uncommon for me to have half a dozen notebook pages filled with stories and notes to show for it when we land at our destination.
So I guess the trick is figuring out how to employ that same work ethic when I’m not stuck in a waiting room or flying 30,000 feet up in the air to allow myself to get back to actually posting my humor columns as scheduled on Fridays, as well as daily blog posts here and even more fun stuff to follow. I want to start small – namely with just my humor column, and then eventually work up to writing the shorter random blog posts that appear here every day as well (secret: sometimes I actually write a week’s worth of posts and backdate ‘em when I feel bad for not posting for a while…).
My column is usually actually the worst anyways because a lot more goes into the writing than just throwing stuff down like I tend to blog, but in general, I have a feeling if I can just dedicate single night each week to making that column happen (Mondays?), not only will that open up the rest of the week as far as editing and punch-ups to add some polish, but it should also make things a lot less stressful because I can certainly vouch that 9 times out of 10 my work isn’t nearly as funny when I’m pressed doing it at the last minute.
So hold me to it, Internet! Starting with this week, new humor columns at comedic-genius.com each and every Friday, on time and ready for your engaged laughter. And while my Monday goal isn’t going to happen this particular week, I do think that I’ve got a fantastic topic that’s going to make it a little easier to put together than most … and for what it’s worth, I’m really looking forward to writing it, too!
2012 will be the year that this writer finally learns to conquer his deadlines, and we’re starting a few months early just to be sure…