Deadlines...

Salut,

sitting on my sofa... No, I didn't bring my sofa in the bus, I have a dentist appointment at 10 and the cleaning lady is also about to show up. So I decided to give you a few minutes before I dive into work work work...

Deadlines... Without a deadline, I'm not sure I would have finished my novel. I decided at one point to finish it before a planned trip down south to meet a cousin of my wife who is living in Europe (yeah, I know, weird, he lives in Europe and we met in Dominican Republic, it was pretty cool actually). Since I wanted to bring him a copy of the first complete draft, I needed to finish it before the trip. I was about 100 pages away from the ending, and about 10 weeks left, so I had to write 10 pages per week. I invested all my lunch time to write at least a page, and then a page every night, and I would have the week-ends as buffer if I was going to run late... And it worked, I completed it before the trip...

Same thing for music. My partner Norm often asks me for deadlines so that we can push ourselves a little more into making music together. We had the deadline of my 40th birthday party to prepare a show, and we did (which reminds me, I should put some of the videos from that show on Youtube, eventually). We also participated in a couple of contest, so those were also deadines that pushed us into completing decent demos.

Same thing at work. Some people might not like it, it adds pressure, stress and frustration, but it helps us being more productive on a day to day basis, during the long season, instead of just waiting for the playoff...

Why do I talk about this today? It is because I'm running late on a deadline at work, and I'm not too proud of myself, so I try (really, I try very hard) to resist the temptation to come talk to you here more often... But... Now... I gotta go... Go MAD Go... Hit this deadline and move on...

BYE
MAD