I have been untethered from away-from-home work for the last two weeks and it’s wreaked havoc with my productivity. My sleep scheduled is all discombulated (I went to bed at 4:30 am Saturday night … er … Sunday morning) and I’m behind on several of my projects. (i.e. It’s 12:30 am as I write this blog post.)

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My friend R tells the story of being asked in a job interview how he worked with deadlines. He replied, “Well, I don’t work very well without them.”

Amen.

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I’ve always believed that two kinds of deadlines exist — internal and external.

An internal deadline is a deadline I create for myself, i.e. I will finish the chart for such and such song by Friday.

An external deadline comes from someone else. It might be work for a client, a student or preparing for a rehearsal.

Somehow the only deadlines that really seem to motivate me are the external ones. I have to complete something for one of my jobs, or a rehearsal or a lesson, so I do.

Internal deadlines turn into target dates. They’re malleable and susceptible to procrastination. (After all, no one will come looking for me if I don’t write that chart by week’s end, so … )

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It’s something about the nature of tasks expanding to fill the time we have to do them and my own personal stubbornness about not doing something until I have to. Til some external circumstance requires me to.

Never mind that I feel guilty and stressed out when I get “behind.” Never mind that the work itself might only take an hour or an afternoon.

Never mind that if I had do the same work for someone else, I would do it and do it on time.

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It is the commitments to my own work — practicing, performing, grant writing, marketing, etc. — that often get short shrift.

I’ll fritter way countless hours of my time until I only have time to work on the work I do for others because that’s all the time that’s left.

I find this pattern of mine endlessly frustrating, yet exceedingly difficult to change.

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To be fair to myself, the built-in motivator with client work is that I get paid for it. There’s a direct link between the work I’m doing and a check to deposit.

There’s not nearly so direct a cause-effect relationship between my other work and my paychecks.

(Also, I know that the way to keep getting client work is to do good work on time.)

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So I guess for me there’s only one kind of deadline. *rueful grin*

But rather than continuing to should all over myself about missing my internal dead … er … target dates, I’m working on noticing my actions around getting my work done. Seeing if I can uncover what works (and what doesn’t) and trying to be kind to myself in the process.

Since I know I can be responsible and hardworking with other people’s projects, I should be able to find a way to be the same kind of “employee” to myself.

Besides, who wants to work for a boss who is never satisfied? *wink*

More Bloggity Goodness

• Working with the Broken Pieces