Welcome to May’s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour.  If you’ve been following along, you know this month’s topic is “Deadlines: Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em.”  Mostly, I’m indifferent.  Deadlines are useful.  They help when I’m planning my work.  In fact, if I don’t have a deadline, and I’m not making the progress I’d like on a project, I impose my own deadline.  How actively I work toward the self-imposed deadline helps me gauge how important the project is to me.

If I set the deadline and ignore it, I’ve determined there are a couple of possible reasons for that.  First, I’m not interested in the project.  But that might not be the only reason.  I might not have defined the project clearly enough to enable me to complete it or to work it effectively.  This is where David Allen’s Getting Things Done question of, “What’s the next action?” can be helpful.  If you’re stuck on a project, ask yourself, “What’s the next action?” Keep breaking the next action down until it’s a task you can perform.  Perform that task, and, you guessed it, ask yourself what the next action is.  Do that.  And so on.  That’s how you move a stalled project along.

If you’re writing, the next action might be, “Write one word.”  (Because, sometimes, two is just too many.)

I guess I misspoke.  I said I was indifferent to deadlines, then I told you if I didn’t have one, I create one.  I guess that puts me solidly in the “love ’em” side of the equation.  But I prefer to set my own deadline rather than have one imposed upon me. What about you?