On deadlines: hurry up and wait

Time is always of the essence. On any project where you’re working with a team, as part of the creative/production process, you’re often either waiting for work to come your way or for someone else to review it, and working against a deadline. The former always seems to involve others taking their sweet-ass time; the latter someone getting their shorts in a knot if you don’t, as my mom would say, “hustle your biscuit” (i.e., get it done fast).

The former is something that seems to frequently happen, and as I write this, I’m killing time for now. (Live update: pages have finally arrived! Gotta go.)

And now it’s future me… Deadlines I can live with; in fact, I thrive on them. There’s a certain comfort of “being nestled” within a timeline. It’s nice knowing when something has to be done, and to know it will be done. When working on a contract, open-ended end dates make me squirrelly. It’s a commitment that keeps changing. I like having the work; I also like knowing when I have/will/need to be finished, and thus free to go on to the next thing.

But waiting is, as Tom Petty sang, the hardest part. When you’re freakishly prompt and everyone else seems to be meandering down their own personal time tunnels to get to you, eventually, it causes anxiety. I mean, come on, people. Hurry up! Be in a rush, like me! Get me the thing you said you wanted me to work on, so I can slot it into the time I had planned!

Yeah, I know. I’m practising meditation to work on this.

Postscript: without deadlines, you just procrastinate. This post was sitting in my draft folder for about three years(!) I finally decided to just edit and share it already. Hope you enjoyed.