Deadlines: When to keep ’em, when to ditch ’em

I'm not talking about hard deadlines here—you know, the ones you'd better heed to keep your job. I'm thinking about the artificial deadlines, the ones on that Post-It on your computer: "Fourth draft completed by April, get agent by December, publish next year." When you are self-employed—and if you're anything like me, you're self-employed by Madam Scrooge herself—such deadlines are useful motivators.

But sometimes stuff happens. Stuff like illness (heart disease from no exercise + too much chocolate + too much caffeine), injury (eye strain, carpal tunnel), and road rage (from swerving dangerously near the car in the next lane while jotting down notes). We try to ignore the kids or parents or house or even our own physical symptoms because if we know one thing it's that "seat of pants in seat of chair" trumps all. So we keep going despite added writerly pressures like frequent rejection and utter lack of job security and WAY too much time spent alone. 

And then we break down. You know the symptoms: nagging self-doubt, sudden crying jags, the need for more and more sleep, and a whole lotta "This is a bunch of hooey and who the hell did I think I was trying to _________ (you're the creative writer, fill it in!), all the while telling yourself that if you could just roll up your sleeves and get some work done you'd feel a heck of a lot better.

Perky and optimistic as you might know me to be, I've just come through such a period, and I have learned that when you are off your game is NOT the best time to expend even more effort to achieve an arbitrarily set goal. Better to ditch it so you can rest and restore.

One of my favorite self-help authors, the late Richard Carlson, suggests we don't need to get better at handling the stress in our lives, we need to become more sensitive to it so we can avoid the stressors determined to get the better of us. He might explain it this way: Before finishing a race course you set for yourself, you sprain your ankle. You don't (hopefully) pop up and say "I just need to run around the block a few more times and it will get better." You heed the pain and rest until it regains strength. There is no glory in finishing the race while injuring yourself further.

Stress is also an injury—an injury to the spirit. It would be equally ineffective to roll up your sleeves and work harder while suffering the effects of acute stress. Yes, our goals are important to us—they see us through when we are whiny or distracted. But when our spirit is injured and we are stressed out and everything exhausts us we must replenish. Chances are, if you worked for a solid week in such a state you wouldn't achieve the results possible by resting for several days, restoring your equilibrium, and working more efficiently.

What I am learning is that effort is not always the answer. Sometimes we need to detach and wait so that the phoenix that is your wise, clever, creative self can once again rise from the ashes within.