To Throw A Slacker on a Deadline

I’m a really lazy dude.

I’ve never tried hiding it. I talk about it all the time. I write blog posts on my laziness. You ask me, and I’ll tell you up straight; yes, I’m lazy.

What’s with the up-front honesty, you ask? I’ll tell you. It isn’t about being honest. Rather, it’s just a bit of me adhering to my principles.

See, I could protest otherwise. I could say, “No, I’m one of the most hardworking people you have ever met, blahdey blahdey blah.” The thing is, then I would require proof of my hard work, which would be more hard work in itself to find, (because there probably isn’t much. I’m too lazy to check)

I’d also have to protest and argue my point, and, well, it’s all really a load of unnecessary work. So, in the interests of being lazy… the right thing to do would be to admit it and get back to doing nothing.

So this is me, cutting to the chase. Hello, I’m lazy.

Am I proud of it?

Well, that’s something else entirely. The truth of it is that being lazy is one of my worst sins. It’s counterproductive, it doesn’t let me perform to my full potential, kind of gets me depressed every once in a while… and it’s so darn fun. Fun makes it addictive. And this isn’t the wholesome, clean fun where you relax and stretch out without a care in the world.

This is guilty fun.

Guilty fun is when you have an exam the next day and you are watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine right now. You tell yourself that you’ll just watch 5 minutes before hitting the books again… and then that’s when you realize it’s what you told yourself two episodes ago. And the whole while, you have that nag in the back of your head.

After having a taste of the good old, carefree, I-just-got-the-darn-thing-done-and-I-deserve-to-kick-back fun, you realize how stressful guilty fun can be. You know what I mean.

That’s also when you realize what some of the mortal enemies of the lazy man are:

Of all the many things this blog has given me over the past six months, there are two that sometimes make me wonder what possessed me to start this in the first place. The first, workload; what the lazy man in me hates more than anything else. Anything else except, possibly, the one other thing that makes me regret starting; the constant, inescapable deadlines.

This is irony if anything ever was. Literally put my head in the noose, I did.

 

Oh, I hate deadlines. Sure, I slack through them, and eventually get them done, but the constant nag is always there in my mind, poking away. Any entertainment I have is of the guilty, “I should be doing the whatever-it-is-that-has-the-darn-deadline thing,” variety.

And that can be a real killjoy as the time begins inevitably to run out, and the clock keeps ticking. Worse when it’s running out and you still have nothing to show for it. Been there, done that.

But the relief you get when you know that the deadline is far off, and you're totally prepared; that you no longer have that obligation to (ugh) work, and you are legally entitled to relax…

That, folks, is precisely what I am trying to achieve, right now.

See, the constant deadlines this blog gave me were easy enough to work with at the start. I was enthusiastic, I was starting out, I had high hopes, all the rest. But as time went on, the sort of monotony got to me as it always does, and I cracked. Two weeks without a post.

And it almost looked like I still hadn’t recovered… till I decided to get back on my feet and swing some more.

So this is me tackling this problem head on… just how do you beat a deadline?

  

There’s just one way of doing it, I'm sorry to say, and that’s the way you have to go: Work.

That's the end result, but the means to that end… there’s where you need to fine tune your approach. I’m going to let you into the way I did this post right here, and that’s coming from someone who was, till an hour ago, totally not in the mood to do anything blog post related today. Trust me, this works.

The first thing you have to do: begin. And by begin, all I mean is write something down.

It doesn’t matter if it’s just the title on a blank page or the first word, beautifully decorated to the point of perfection…

… what’s important is that is that you have something down on paper right there, so to speak. Getting the first move on with your assignment/blogpost/project is the first hurdle, and when you have that laid down, you’re on your way.  

It doesn’t matter how perfectly written it is; the phrase ‘first draft’ exists for a reason. Write as much as you can, and don’t think about editing (more on editing below). When you come back later, you’ll have fresher ideas, and they will look much better.

To get those ideas, though, you should have something concrete to build up on top of. So, get that ‘The’ decorated already!

Number Two, another something I do that I think is important: I don’t go in consciously telling myself that I will keep writing till I finish. Nope, that mentality stops me from even thinking about starting.

What I do know is that at the least I’ll do a sentence, and at most a paragraph. Maybe try telling yourself this when you start and mean it; it could very well help get those creative juices flowing. When you get bored, like me, you can take my remedy, which also happens to be the most necessary thing that comes with all my endeavors at literary brilliance:

Number Three: Don't be afraid to jump. 

Laziness goes hand in hand with a short attention span for the important stuff. At least, it does with me. If I hit a point where I don’t feel like writing, I can take a break, sure. But then when I come back, chances are I still don’t feel like writing that particular bit. What do I do, take another break?

I see you grinning. Sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re here to finish the job off.

The point you’re writing now doesn't seem to be flowing? Skip down the page and start another paragraph on some other point. Keep at it till you lose interest again, and either go back to what you were working on before, or start a whole new one.

If you’re typing on a computer, like I am, don’t be afraid to leave half-finished sentences strewn throughout your work, provided, of course, you’re going to do a proper re-reading and editing later on. It keeps you on the project and away from doing something else… and every word you write is one less word that you have to.

Do not ever underestimate this one. It is seriously useful advice, and it’s what mostly kept the production of this post alive (apologies for that, dear Reader).

Similar to this is Number Four, to write down any ideas you get while writing something else. Again, if you’re on a computer, skip down a bit from where you’re writing now and type in that bit. This is pretty useful when you’re doing a blog post up from scratch, like I am now. It helps me keep on track, and as a bonus, I don’t forget to include useful points that I might miss otherwise.

Number Five: Give it a while before you start editing.

This is an obvious point, but I’m throwing it in just for the sake of completeness. Never edit right off the bat, since there are two things that could happen:

One, you will not notice most mistakes or better ways to rephrase your words since you just wrote them. Coming back later with fresh eyes, even after an hour, will allow you to find holes you previously missed and reword sentences in a much better way. Happens to yours truly all the time.

Two, rather than wasting your time in an ineffective edit, you could be spouting out more raw words that could be molded later. Too much editing gets boring after a while, take it from me, and editing too soon can be more damaging than helpful.

And... I believe that’s about it. If you’re wondering why I said ‘number’ instead of ‘step’, well, these aren’t steps. They’re the things I do, and apart from the obvious starting off and editing, there’s no order per se to them.  

When I start writing, it’s usually boring; but when I have written enough, with plenty of breaks in between, habit takes over. I start to take fewer and fewer pauses, and do more writing, if that’s believable. Hey, this blog post is living proof of how these five can help get even the most obstinate person to create a piece of art… provided that he needs to.

Whether or not the art is fit for reading is another matter. I leave that up to you to decide, if you made it this far.

                                                                                                            

At the end of the day, the point I'm trying to make is that this attitude

                                                                                                       ... does not have to be the way you handle things all the time. Fellow procrastinators, try for that sweet, carefree rest that is even more satisfying after doing what needs to be done. You'll thank yourself for it.

And remember, this is coming from The Lazy Man himself.