The Power of Procrastination…to ruin your week.

I have a monthly ritual. It’s nothing too meaningful, but it’s certainly consistent.

It goes something like this: the last day of the month arrives, and I am frantically typing up the last of my writing assignments so I can get them in before the midnight invoicing deadline. Some months, the process starts a bit earlier and I spend days glued to my laptop because I realize there is too much work and not enough month left.

That was what happened this month. I took on a couple big projects and miscalculated the time needed to finish them. It was so bad that I actually worked on Easter – Easter! – and that’s saying a lot since Sundays and holidays are usually my unplugged days.

It’s all very stress-inducing and leads to daily living that is a far cry from what I want for me and my family. Before you know it, the jumbo bag of mini-eggs is gone, and your 3 year-old has watched more hours of PowerPuff Girls than you care to admit in a public forum. You realize your 6 year-old has been wearing the same socks all week, and you’re secretly hoping one of the kids will ask if you can order pizza for dinner so you can pretend it wasn’t actually your idea.

Procrastination: Why do we repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again?

In my defense, I thought I was doing better this month. I even dropped a client so I could free up some time and create margin in my life.

However, somehow I managed to fill that time with other things and while I staggered my work throughout the month on my calendar, I didn’t actually follow through in practice. These seem to be my two sticking points:

  • I’m so mentally exhausted after a week of cramming too much writing in at the end of the month that I essentially take the next week off.
  • Many of my assignments require interviews, and I tend to push those articles back until I identify a source.

On the first point, I probably need to be simply aware of what’s going on. Taking a day or two off is ok, but once I’ve gone a whole week without putting a dent in my monthly assignments, I’m setting myself up for failure.

As to the second point, that’s a bit trickier. I have weekly articles that require financial experts to weigh in on various topics, and I have no problem finding sources. But those are for U.S. News and who doesn’t want to be quoted in U.S. News?

But Schools.com? Eh, not so much. And that’s a shame because Schools.com and the other smaller sites I write for have a lot of excellent content that is also syndicated out to major players like MSN and Yahoo. But it can be a tough sell when people aren’t familiar with a site or when the writing isn’t for a feature article.

For these articles, I send out feelers to find a source and then put the article on my calendar for a week out. Then a week goes by and I haven’t found a source so I bump it back another week. Do that one more time and then I’m right back to my monthly ritual: trying desperately to cram an interview and article in at the last minute.

Clearly, I need to do something different.

So this month, my solemn vow to myself and to you, my not-so-numerous blog readers, is that I will do better.

In April, I will not be the mom who is feeding her kids leftovers and McDonald’s for a week so she can spend hours on her laptop at night. I will not be the writer who is sending (yet another!) apology note to her editor for turning in her work just under the wire. I will not be the woman who goes to bed thinking about online veterinary schools because my work is consuming my every waking hour.

I’ll get going immediately…right after I take this next week off.

What’s your personal time management struggle? Or, even better, if you’re a time management ninja, please share your secrets!

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