3 Responses so far

1. 1. Steve Buchheit on Jun 27th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

   Me neither. The real ones, like Saturday’s deadline for this Quarter’s Writers of the Future, drive me crazy. But as Douglas Adams said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they rush by.”

2. 2. Tobias Buckell on Jun 28th, 2006 at 2:40 am

   Heh Exactly.

3. 3. Mark Terry on Jun 28th, 2006 at 7:44 am

   I’m pretty good at creating “internal deadlines” for myself that I can be quite brutal about meeting. I popped over to that site and read what he had to say, and part of what he’s talking about is what I call “mission creep,” a military term that means, for instance, going to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives and years and years trying to quell a civil war. In my case, mission creep refers to editor or project managers or publishers who hire you to do one thing, then as the project moves on, keeps throwing “just one more thing” or “do you think you could…” I try to be accommodating, but I’ve got a big project going like that now where I’ve created my deadlines, which he has described as “harsh,” but I have had to say, literally, “…although I’m not opposed to another chapter or section in the clinical diagnostics market in Asia/Europe/Africa, etc., I have my hands full trying to meet the deadlines as is for the project you hired me to do, so I will takes notes on this subject as it comes up, and if I have time at the end, I’ll consider it…” Which, at least a little bit, seems to appease him.

   Best,
   Mark Terry
   www.mark-terry.com

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