GETTING SH*T DONE (or not)

So, here's the deal: We all love to dream about the amazing things we'll accomplish in our writing career. The great American novel we will write. The Oscar winning screenplay. The Emmy-hogging Game of Thrones that'll outrun NCIS in it's 40th season... But the sad truth is that without doing the actual work, these dreams will always remain... DREAMS. Or maybe more accurately: Lucid, fever-visions of a tormented and tragically naive writer.

The truth of the matter is that without butt-in-chair time, words on the page and finished, quality work, nothing even remotely resembling progress will take place in our career. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. 

Friends and colleagues seem to think that I'm a pretty productive person. My friend and career coach Lee Jessup recently even asked me to write a guest blog about productivity. You can only imagine my quiet laughter as I found myself pushing the task of actually writing it off. Not. Getting. It. Done. Eventually, with a deadline looming, I found myself procrastinating about why people seem to think that I am efficient and productive, when I'M SO OBVIOUSLY NOT.

Maybe it's because I'm German. Maybe it's because I like planners and big watches. Maybe it's because I've designed a productivity journal for writers... But the more time I spent thinking about why people think I am all that, the more I realized what "productivity" actually comes down to for me.

It's easy to think that productivity is about personality. But while there are certainly predispositions, I believe that a big part of it comes down to the pragmatic understanding that shit won't get done unless you do it. Not that hard a concept, right? Maybe it's because of the pragmatic, German way I was raised, but whenever I catch myself dreaming... after a fair amount of bitching-and-moaning as to why things haven't exactly panned out yet, I inevitably find myself asking if I'm actually contributing enough to achieve my dreams. The answer is almost always a resounding NOPE, NOT EVEN CLOSE.

Once I got to that point, I can usually find a way to trick myself into actually getting shit done on behalf of the dream-fairy.

The blog post Lee asked me to write, ended up being a list of tools that help tricking yourself into getting shit done. YOU CAN READ IT HERE