My Strategies For Taking On Deadlines

The last installment in my series on productivity.

This is the last installment in a series about “productivity.” Read the first two entries here and here.

Back in December, DK asked for “thoughts on what you do when you’re having a week where you don’t feel good enough, productive enough, etc.” So far, I’ve written up my thoughts on “the productivity scam” and ways in which we can displace productivity as our go-to metric for our days and weeks. But, let’s face it, there are still days when we have to get down to work and tackle a looming deadline. For this (very, very belated? Healthily procrastinated?) third installment in my series on productivity, I sat down last week and gave myself a firm deadline. It was time to share my “show up or shut up” thoughts on what I do when I need to get a piece of writing done.

As you might have gleaned from my last two posts on productivity, I’m not the most productive person. Nor do I want to be known as the most productive person—there are plenty of other values I hold higher. I’ve also come to accept that when I am productive, it will often follow stretches of unproductivity. That’s just something I’ve learned about myself by now; and if you’re someone else who gets anxious about not doing enough, keep in mind that your “output” is never going to be constant. There will always be peaks and valleys; I’d argue that often the time we spend in those valleys is just as valuable as the time spent ascending peaks.

For the most part, when I get into a productivity scramble, it’s in the context  of writing assignments like personal essays or cultural criticism, which have to be completed quickly because they’re somehow pegged to a news cycle. I find this to be one of the more stressful types of projects to take on because, in a my anxious mind, this is a rock and a hard place: we’re more likely to make mistakes if we work quickly but, in this case, if we take too long to file our assignment, we risk missing the moment. So how do  I best position myself to be productive when I have no choice but to get down to brass tacks? I take it in three of stages:

1.

For me, a lot of my productivity depends on what I’ve done to best position myself to thrive before an editor says “Okay, Saeed, great idea! Here’s your deadline!” First,  I try to be clear with myself about my general bandwidth. If I’m in the middle of book edits or need to read twenty books in the next six weeks for an award panel, I know damn well that I can’t take on a freelance writing assignment. And when my workload is lighter, I still try to be discerning. If you take away anything from this post, please let it be this next sentence: If it’s not a HELL YES, it’s a NO. 

Writing is hard; creating anything is hard; and doing it on the internet is terrifying. So if my immediate response to an idea or an opportunity isn’t a passionate, fierce, DEEPLY URGENT yes, then that’s not the assignment for me. It’s certainly a luxury that I can afford to operate in this way; freelance writing isn’t how I pay my bills. But I still think this is worthwhile to note for any creative out there; especially since it’s hard for anyone to pay the bills by freelancing. The best way to be productive, I find, is to find the projects where my writing can come from a place of urgent, almost overwhelming, need to understand what is going on.