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The Luxury of a Catch-Up Day

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Photo credit: Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Don’t misunderstand me—it’s definitely a luxury. But if you can carve it out, Catch-Up Day is one of the loveliest gifts you can give yourself.

It’s not glamorous or exciting. After all, the entire purpose of Catch-Up Day is—well, catching up. The myriad of tasks, errands, and duties that keep getting shoved aside in favor of more important and/or urgent obligations. All appointments you’ve been meaning to make, the phone calls you need to return, the emails that require responses—Catch-Up Day is the day to check all those things off your list.

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Missing the Deadline

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Image credit: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay

I set a deadline for completing the second draft of my novel: I would finish Draft #2 by January 31.

As of today, February 2, I have not finished it. Nor will I be able to do so this week, or probably next week.

In all fairness, I’ve had many things to do this week, primarily work. Still, when I set the deadline, I knew I’d be working, and it seemed reasonable anyway.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of things like planning, scheduling, and setting deadlines. Having a deadline is what lights a fire under me. Otherwise, I’d meander along life’s path, talking about how I’m going to do this or that “someday”—which, of course, rarely comes.

So why didn’t the deadline work for me this time?

I could point to a number of causes, but probably the main one is the simplest: I failed to plan for delays.

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Letting Go

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Photo credit: Ankus Minda on Unsplash

We all know the feeling, especially at the holidays: everything needs to be done, and it needs to be done NOW.

I know I should be grateful. Lots of billable work, including four items on deadline in the next two weeks, in addition to the three I already wrapped up and shipped out this week. Nothing horrifically difficult, but all requiring time and attention before satisfied clients respond with payments that keep the lights on and the cat food in stock.

And that’s just the day job. For the publishing job, I hauled books and table decorations to four holiday market events in nine days, beginning the day after Thanksgiving, and I have two more this weekend and one next weekend. Those have been a blast as I’ve met readers and gift-givers who bought signed (and sometimes wrapped) copies of State v. Claus. Even more fun is meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in ages, including a former student whom I hadn’t seen in nearly forty(!) years who made the trek to Hartford with her charming husband, just to say hello and buy a couple of signed books.

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The Season of Crazy-Busyness

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Photo credit: H. Newberry on Pixabay

Personally, I blame the school year.

Like so many, I grew up with the school-year routine: after a summer of fun and relaxation, work begins in the fall, continues through the winter (albeit with a couple of breaks), and wraps up in late spring. Even though we non-educators don’t actually get the summer off (other than an isolated vacation day, or maybe a cherished week or two if we’re very lucky), there’s still the sense that life slows down in the summer, only to ramp up in late August in anticipation of a return to the over-full schedule of classes, sports, rehearsals, homework, commitments, subscription series—not to mention resumption of all the tasks and deadlines that we pushed to the side while our colleagues and clients were away and we basked in the peace of their absence.

Hence, the Season of Crazy-Busyness.

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