Guest blogger Holly McCarthy writes on the subject of college degree programs online at YellowPages.com. Here, she shares her strategies for managing deadlines. Holly invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com.
As a full-time freelance writer, I am in the enviable position of being able to work from the comfort of my own home and manage my work load as I see fit. So many people that I talk to about work say that they just couldn’t do it; they feel that they would spend too much time procrastinating and messing around to get the work done on time.
When asked how I manage to deal with the deadlines given to me on a daily and weekly basis, I let people know that I am just as human as they are. I do tend to put things off—I think it’s only human nature to want to get things done when you really need to get them done. Therefore, I tend to write like a college student the night before a term paper is due.
I generally have some of the same deadlines each and every week, yet I tend to leave things for crunch time. I’ve often wondered why, and I think the main reason I do this is that it has always worked for me. In college, I once wrote a twenty-four page paper for a philosophy class the morning that it was due.
Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of things that I do throughout the week to prepare for meeting my deadlines. When I look at my projects and what I will be writing about for the week, I make a list on paper of the topics that I will be writing about and keep it with me at all times.
Using a small Moleskine notebook, I make notes when some of my topics arise in conversations or on the news. I also spend a great deal of time on the internet, mining data so that I have a large knowledge base with which to compose original material.
When the moment of truth is upon me, it is almost like I am a possessed man; I will snap to attention and realize that I am almost done with my work just a few hours shy of deadline. Then, I go to bed and get ready to do it all over again for the next week.
