Amusing. But Good?
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Over at Medium, Jeff Goins lays
out "8 Simple Steps I've Used to Write 5 Bestselling Books." I
think most of the advice is good, but am not so sure about Item 6, on
setting a due date. That said, the following method of enlisting help
to meet a deadline made me smile:
A friend of mine, a talented writer, did this recently when he wanted to finish a book he'd been thinking about for years. Fearing he might never reach the last page, he wrote a check to a political candidate he hated, and post-dated it for X months in the future. Then he gave the check to a friend with strict instructions to mail it if he had not completed his book by that date.This is funny, and it seems to have worked for the writer who came up with it, but is this generally good advice? I think the answer here is: It depends. What problem is one trying to solve? There can be numerous legitimate reasons one can't complete a book by some deadline, particularly a first book, and particularly if the deadline is arbitrary in any way. So if one has not set a realistic, but still challenging time goal, this tactic can backfire. But if, knowing oneself to have a tendency to procrastinate, and knowing, further, that being nudged by others helps one past psychological inertia, something like this can be helpful -- IF one has found a way to set a reasonable deadline.
On that last score, some advice on iteratively chopping goals in half I vaguely recall can probably help. (If anyone recalls the name of this process, or something that this sounds like, please feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.) As I recall -- but haven't time to verify this morning -- one breaks the goal into chunks, and those into chunks and so on until one reaches tasks of known duration. Then one can construct a time line. Doing this would dovetail with Goins's other idea of creating a schedule, which would enable one to leverage very effectively having a set routine.
-- CAV
2 comments:
I think one major problem with gimmicks like writing a check to donate to a politician you hate--or working in an empty room, or having someone refuse to let you eat until you do X amount of work, or whatever gimmick it is--is that it's not scalable. What works for me may not work for you; it's entirely based on the individual. That's not to say it's ineffective; it may be very powerful. But it's not transferable beyond the person it was designed to help.
In general, I like the Manager Tools saying "Work expands to fill the time allotted to it." If you have a deadline of 6 weeks, the work will take 6 weeks. If you reduce it to 4 weeks, you'll get it done in 4. There are limits, obviously, but it illustrates the problem of not having deadlines: the timeframe is limitless, and therefore the work takes infinitely long.
Dinwar,
I don't have a problem in principle with the non-scalability or the gimmicks, at least for personal projects. This is because people have all kinds of psychological idiosyncrasies, and it can be helpful to find a gimmick that works for oneself. (That said, the above gimmick wouldn't help me, and doesn't address a problem I have, anyway.)
That said, I think looking for gimmicks to the exclusion of getting a better understanding of what a craft or a kind of project require is a big mistake. For every person who needs to make meeting a deadline into a game, there are probably several others who simply don't know how to plan in order to meet the deadline, and probably a few who ought to reconsider the whole goal they are setting for themselves.
Gus
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