Episode Description:
In this episode of "What If? For Authors," Claire Taylor tackles the anxiety-inducing topic of deadlines. Drawing from her experience as an Enneagram coach and her own author journey, Claire explores the complexities of deadlines and how they affect different Enneagram types. Whether you love deadlines or dread them, this episode provides a compassionate and realistic approach to managing your writing schedule.
Key Takeaways:
Deadlines can create a sense of control and order but may also lead to burnout and disconnection from your creative work.
Understanding your Enneagram type can provide valuable insights into your relationship with deadlines.
It's important to develop self-compassion and flexibility when setting and attempting to meet deadlines.
Conditions outside your control can affect your ability to meet deadlines; recognize and respect these factors.
Why Listen? If you find yourself struggling to meet deadlines or feeling overwhelmed by them, this episode offers a thoughtful and empathetic perspective. This episode is a must-listen for any author seeking to balance productivity with well-being.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or fear you'd like me to explore? Reach out to me at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
Transcript:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm a certified Enneagram coach for authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer of a bunch of books. Oh, and I'm also a non-fiction writer. And by the time you listen to this episode, my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, will probably be available to buy on all your favorite retailers.
If you like listening to me here, you'll like the book. And if you hate listening to me here, you might still like the book because I'm slightly less snarky in it than I am on this podcast. I don't know. I didn't write that book for six drunk authors at Bar Con, in other words.
I'm pretty excited about today's topic, so let's jump right into it. Today's episode asks the question, what if I can't hit deadlines? I love this question and I get it a lot because it seems like our lives [00:01:00] would have so much more ease and flow if we could just hit the damn deadlines. Doesn't it? Like set a deadline, calculate how much you have to do each day, then do that amount.
each day. My Enneagram oneness is like, fuck yeah, order instead of chaos. We love it. The bad news is that I've worked with so many authors who are trying to do this, and of those who can pull it off, they usually aren't enjoying it after a while. It's like their consciousness has completely left their body in order to hit those deadlines.
So, in other words, whatever joy or relief the author might have hoped to get from getting those rewards of hitting the deadline, it's not precisely what they're getting. Maybe it's comforting to stay on schedule? I honestly wouldn't know because I have a tendency to fill my schedule so tightly that it's a miracle I get anything done at all.
But at what [00:02:00] cost does one earn that comfort? That deadlines and staying on schedule can bring. Now, if you're listening and thinking, I love setting deadlines, and I hit them easily, and I enjoy my life, so I don't know what you're talking about, Claire, then I'm, truly, truly happy for you. That's great.
You can skip to the next episode. Let the rest of us overwhelmed degenerates talk privately then. If you're an indie author, Then you're almost always setting the deadlines for yourself. So this makes the struggle to hit deadlines, feel even more ludicrous sometimes, but I promise it makes a whole lot of sense.
Once we look at what's really going on beneath the surface here, if you're a traditionally published author, then you may not be setting the deadlines, but you're agreeing to them for the most part when you sign the contracts. So that doesn't make it harder or easier to hit those deadlines. It's just a different kind of [00:03:00] complication.
Let's say you're setting your own deadlines and then failing to hit them over and over again. There are a few things that are probably going on internally inside of you. Your adult voice is trying to put some boundaries on your creativity and add a little bit of practicality in there because you want to make money selling books, so you need to, you know, publish books.
The adult voice and the playful inner artist voice don't necessarily get along, and sometimes that artist wants to rebel against the man, even if the man is you. Why do you keep setting deadlines then? Because you're probably afraid of the chaos that will ensue if you don't. Or maybe you know that you won't do anything without the fear of a time crunch motivating you.
So this points out what many of us use deadlines for, which is fear based motivation. We create a false time scarcity with our made up deadlines to [00:04:00] try to get that adrenaline going. That can help us sometimes muster the energy to sit and write, even when any, everything in our body in our mind, in our heart, is telling us to rest.
So maybe we're not hitting these deadlines because we're too damn tired and we haven't admitted to ourselves that we need rest or given ourselves the permission to fulfill our basic human need for rest.
But it's also possible that we catch onto our own scheme. If we're the ones trying to pull one over with the synthetic time crunch, then we know it's made up. Part of us knows that the world will keep spinning if we don't finish our first draft by the end of the month or whatever. So what do we do? We stick another project right up against the deadline to create even more made up reason for us not to fall behind.
It becomes this matter of, if you miss this deadline, then you'll be behind on the next book project. And you'll [00:05:00] keep falling behind until you die. I'm telling on myself with that example, but I see it happen a lot. And it's usually found in people who are really high achievers in school. So we learned that little bit of trickery. To keep us engaged in homework and projects that didn't matter at all to us outside of the grade we could capture from them.
So yeah, we're trained to disconnect from the meaning behind our mental labor very easily. Early in life,
that can be great. If you don't work a job you love, but not great. If you're trying to work your dream job of being an author, you got to stay connected to the work or else things start to fall apart. The other problem here is that people are generally bad at estimating how long things will take them to complete, even if it's things that they've done a thousand times before, like writing a book chapter.
Humans often fall victim to the planning fallacy, which dismisses how long a project or task has taken us to complete in the past, [00:06:00] and instead estimates the time as if there will be no complications or fuck ups along the way. We won't get sick, we won't have to take an unexpected day off, we won't get shit sleep one night, and be dragging the next morning, that sort of thing.
There's also the optimism bias that we suffer from. Yeah, everybody suffers from this, where humans plan projects based on the idea that they will be functioning at their peak throughout the duration. Instead of Looking back at how long it took us the last ten times and realizing that every single book we've written has fallen behind schedule by, say, two weeks.
No way we'd add two weeks to our deadline, though. Uh uh. Never. That last time? That was last time. This time, though. This time will be different. The optimism bias happens to almost everyone, by the way, not just the self-proclaimed optimists. So you can be a pessimist and still have the optimism bias.
Already there is a lot going on with our relationship to [00:07:00] deadlines. And if someone else sets the deadline for you, there's even more happening beneath the surface. Maybe you hate the person who said it, and resent that they're telling you what to do. You may internally rebel and find that it's hard to get yourself to focus because focusing feels like bending to their will.
Or maybe someone you don't like setting a deadline for you stirs within you some real fuck this guy energy that makes you want to beat the deadline by a mile, right? That can be gratifying in the short term, but Anyone who's ever met a deadline early can also tell you what happens next. You're assigned something else right away and then given even less time to complete it because you've established a precedent of doing things quickly.
So I learned this the hard way when I was an in-house editor for Romance Publisher. It was fast paced, high volume work. There was one time I was given a single Eight hour day to proofread a 200 page manuscript. Usually though, we were given four days for a copy edit, [00:08:00] which is still not enough fucking time.
I learned real quick that if I completed something early, my reward was another manuscript right away that may or may not be a complete disaster. So the work never stopped. That's also how it goes with indie publishing. The work never stops unless you make it stop. As in, taking a break. When I was editing for this publisher, I learned that.
And I would either go slow with lots of breaks to Google factoids, that I could find in the book. Or I would finish the job ahead of deadline and act like I was still working on it, just so I could catch my breath. So not the greatest employee, but I was doing what I needed to, to stay in that job and not burn myself out completely. I can attest to the process of doing something really quickly to piss off the authority who assigned the deadlines as not a great approach. That would be an example of stupid games, stupid prizes. Now let's say you really like and respect the person who assigns you [00:09:00] the deadline. There's a whole new bag of problems there, right?
If the deadline isn't realistic, on top of the stress of trying to meet it, there's the emotional stress of not wanting to let that person down or make them disappointed in you. Or maybe you don't want to let on that you're struggling, or you want to impress them, but don't feel like you can, or maybe you feel like you're going to get in trouble or hurt the relationship in some other way.
If you miss it, all those anxieties are emotional ones that can make the already tough task of completing the project, even more fraught yikes. So now that I've given voice to a lot of the feelings around deadlines, I should probably do what I do. Best? Maybe not best. Most frequently? Sure. I'll do what I do most frequently and break this down by Enneagram type, even though I said I don't want to do that in every episode because it's a lot.
I don't see another way. So maybe it's time for me to surrender. To the [00:10:00] trap that I've set for myself. And just let this podcast be what it's going to be. Alright. The trickiness of deadlines, if you're a one, an Enneagram one, is that you tend to set them, or agree to them, based on an idealized version of yourself and your capacity.
And then, once you make them, your sense of personal obligation and responsibility urges you to do whatever it takes to meet them, even if that's burning yourself out completely. So you've gotta watch out for that. Alright.
Here's my little kick in the pants to you ones. Stop expecting more from yourself than you'd expect from anyone else. Who made you so damn special? And I mean that with love. I have to tell myself that all the time to have a little self compassion. Come on, Claire, who made you so special that you're supposed to be able to do all these things in a short amount of time, an exceptionally high standard of quality, and without triggering a single migraine?
But seriously, Ones, a little perspective goes a long [00:11:00] way. Nothing we're doing is so urgent that it's worth destroying our health and our peace. We deserve joy, too, just like everyone else. The trickiness of deadlines, if you're a two, is that you're probably overextending yourself, committing to too many things with too many people.
That need to be needed can compel you to say yes anytime someone asks for your help before you have time to think about whether you actually have time in your schedule to do what you say you're going to do. Then you might make room in your schedule by skipping out on sleep or basic self care. And then everything starts to fall apart before too long.
You'd be lucky to meet a single deadline at that point, let alone all the ones you've agreed to. So that little pause to ask if you actually have the capacity to agree to a new commitment before you agree can go a long way. And I promise, that what feels like selfishness to you doesn't register that [00:12:00] way to people who are not twos.
So practice saying, I can't commit to that. I cannot commit to that. You'll find that meeting one deadline is a lot easier than meeting 20. Strange, huh? Okay Threes, you're gonna get a rush out of deadlines. That has been my experience. Threes love deadlines. And you're gonna get a rush so much that you might give yourself too many if you start measuring your value by how many deadlines you can hit.
If you're one of the Threes who struggles with workaholism, which is most of the ones I work with, and no shame on that. We all have the thing we struggle with. If that's the case though, then you got to look at every deadline with the most suspicion possible. You may be prone to setting so many deadlines that you don't allow yourself to second guess why you're doing all the work you're doing.
The real drawback for you to being so busy is that it disconnects you from your heart center. So emotions don't [00:13:00] work on a deadline, which can be incredibly inconvenient when you like hitting deadlines. So this, the temptation here is to push them aside until you have time to feel them. But if you keep going from one project to the next without pauses in between, you end up having to disconnect from your heart center, sometimes completely, and that eventually catches up with you in a big way.
Emotions will be heard eventually, even if it takes a while. depending on how long it takes and how much you've pushed them to the side, they could come crashing in at a very inconvenient time and in a very inconvenient way. Besides, if you're only making decisions with your head and gut and leaving out your heart, you're ignoring an entire center of intelligence and likely making, frankly, heartless decisions as a result.
Businesses can only get away with those for so long before it catches up with them. So if you're a three who enjoys deadlines, consider [00:14:00] building in breaks between those deadlines. And during the projects to feel your feelings at their own pace. Eventually that heart center might become integrated enough that it's involved in everything you do.
And if you get to that point, you're going to be unstoppable, frankly. But until then, slow those deadlines down and build in space to feel your feelings. They have important things to say. Fours, meanwhile, are like deadlines? Haven't heard of them. That's obviously a gross oversimplification. There are plenty of productive, , fours. Because it's not like fours don't feel like they should be able to work on a deadline. And sometimes they face deadlines whether they put themselves there or not, and the angst over trying to meet them can become a lot.
A shame spiral can follow if the four isn't careful in these situations. So if you're a four that has no choice but to try to meet a deadline that's set by your editor, or publisher, or [00:15:00] whoever, what I recommend is to take a sticky note, then write in all caps on it, Simplify, don't complicate. Because a lot of the trouble with fours trying to hit a deadline is that they feel the need to make everything more complex than it necessarily needs to be.
So this is especially true if the four has connected the concept of complexity with authenticity. Which many fours have. So not everything is more authentic when it's complicated. Maybe go ahead and think about how you might be doing this in your mind without realizing it. If you keep things simple, when that's all they need to be, then you might be surprised how much less stress you feel around deadlines you can't control.
It's rare that I see fours set hard deadlines for themselves. And that can be a good thing for stress levels. But if the four starts feeling stressed about not having it. having anything to show for their work or their, their time or their, their thoughts and [00:16:00] feelings about the manuscript, then it's time to put some of those structures in place.
Maybe not deadlines, but other structures. Take a little bit of the structure from your line to one, if you're a four and add that into the routine. So it doesn't feel like you're really spinning your wheels constantly.
That being said, there's a difference between structure and deadlines. So pick deadlines carefully. Fives may coexist with deadlines well if they're the ones that set them, but if someone else has set the deadline and it doesn't provide enough space for the five to do the learning and research they need for the project, then that will become a point of stress, or if the expectations of the project change midway through, or or the five isn't left alone enough to work on the project in peace, then the five will definitely be stressed out.
I tend to see fives who are quite happy with setting and meeting deadlines, with the exception of a five who is under a [00:17:00] lot of stress and moving toward that scattered type seven energy. The seven energy is so counter to the focus the five usually enjoys that it can be incredibly unsettling for a five to go there.
And it will make any deadline seem like a total energy drain. Of course, no one really likes deadlines when they're slipping towards their stress type. But I point it out because I don't want any fives to feel like they're an abnormality just because deadlines do stress them out. Sixes tend to like when others set deadlines for them, assuming the person who said it seems more like a friend than a foe and has the six's best interest at heart.
It can be a relief for a 6 who spends a lot of time in doubt to have the clarity of a deadline. But that doubt can sometimes lead to stress when the deadline is near, and there are still big decisions to be made. A 6 is likely to feel emotional stress around possibly getting in [00:18:00] trouble for not meeting the deadline, which doesn't always add clarity.
to the decision process. On the other hand, some sixes are just going to rebel about anything that anyone calling themselves authority tells them to do. In which case, the six will very much not respond well to externally set deadlines. A lot about this depends on how the six feels about the person setting the deadline, and whether the six wants to keep ties with them or subtly undermine them.
When it comes to deadlines that sixes set for themselves, I haven't seen a whole lot of success with this, but if the six can somehow wrangle their sense of duty to apply to their own progress, I could see it working. Sevens and deadlines are who, boy, . My advice to my type seven clients is generally not to set a deadline because it doesn't usually create the intended result of getting things [00:19:00] done.
Instead, it. It often causes the Seven to either miss the deadline and then develop a complex, usually one that was started way back in elementary school, about how they can never hit deadlines and are irresponsible, so on and so forth. Or the Seven does manage to hit the deadline, but only through massive last minute spikes in cortisol, overdoing it with caffeine, and inviting the taskmaster voice of their inner critic.
To berate them about being irresponsible until the job is done. So none of that is what I would define as healthy. what a shitty gift to leave at the altar of productivity. Here is, here is all of my health. I have destroyed it. I usually recommend seven set up a system of celebration checkpoints along the path and start to notice when they're feeling FOMO and use that indicator to bring their attention back to the task at hand.
The manuscript will be [00:20:00] done when it's done. And that actually goes for all types. Eights like the challenge of deadlines, but like ones, they're not particularly great at estimating how long they realistically need. Part of this for eights is that they are caught in cycles of forcefulness, so forcing things feels incredibly familiar and is therefore not their approach of choice for writing.
Too much free time can make the eight uncomfortable, so they create near impossible timelines with those deadlines to keep themselves in that aroused state of forcing. At the same time, eights can feel like deadlines are restrictions, even the deadlines they set for themselves. And if that switch is flipped, Then the rebelling will start if they're, they're feeling of being controlled is triggered, activate rebellion, even if it's not in the eight's best interest, this can happen.
[00:21:00] So eights need to be conscious of what it feels like when they go from rushing toward a deadline. To feeling the restriction of it, like it's trying to impede on their independence. A little flexibility can go a long way. With that deadline moving it a little bit back, just a tad, that can go a long way.
And it may be, just hear me out, eights. It may be, better than burning the deadline to the ground. I'm just, I'm throwing it out there. Nines almost always self identify as procrastinators, but I find that they just need a little extra time to percolate before they're ready to act. The percolation We'll often take up as much space as it's allowed though, so that's something to consider when looking at deadlines for a nine.
More percolation time doesn't necessarily mean a better result either. I find that nines would prefer not to have deadlines, so they don't tend to put them on [00:22:00] themselves. When they do, they can usually, you know, it doesn't matter themselves out of sticking to the deadlines. All the nines tendency to believe that they don't matter and therefore their work isn't important is usually a belief that I, I will work with nines to challenge and possibly dispel.
In this case, I agree. In the indie publishing world, especially, it doesn't really matter that much if you finish the book today or next week as long as you don't have, you know, like a pre order date set or an appointment with an editor booked already, then it's okay. I think more types could benefit from listening to the 9's approach here, but at the same time, if someone sets a deadline for the 9, then we can run into issues.
Adding a deadline doesn't suddenly sort out the 9's struggle to prioritize. And, you know, isolate the most important elements of their work in progress. So, for example, if a three is running up against a deadline, they might take a step back, [00:23:00] look at what parts of the novel are most important to readers, and give their attention to those specific places in the minimal time they have left.
A nine will probably struggle to see one element as more important than the others because of how the nine sees everything. Being so connected. I mean, that's their gift, seeing how everything is connected and in harmony with each other. So, the Nine is more likely to simply start back at the beginning for revisions and then try and just go all the way through giving equal attention to every part.
Which is slow work. So adding a deadline doesn't magically change this about the nine, so the nine may either miss the deadline, or simply be very, very stressed and disappointed in themselves on the home stretch. So there are all the problems with deadlines that each type may run into. As a one, I'm great at finding problems sometimes even where there are none, [00:24:00] but I would also be remiss if I didn't leave you with some possible solutions and hope, because that's what this podcast is about. Okay. So deadlines create comfort.
They create a sense of control and order over the future. And they certainly help when multiple people are involved in a project. Okay. But in general, I think capitalism's idea that our value comes from our production has made us worship at the altar of deadlines way too much. The world won't end if you don't have your beats written by a certain day.
If shit pops up in your life and you have to delay the completion of your book by a week or even a year, people may be disappointed, some may even be angry with you, but no one will die. That doesn't mean your book isn't important. It just means that it's not more important than everything else in your life.
I will always encourage you to put your health and well being first. Otherwise, you'll hit a point where you can't write [00:25:00] any books because you're so unwell or dead. So let's delay the inevitable as long as possible, shall we? I encourage you to go back and listen again to where I talk about your type's relationship with deadlines.
The first step to addressing the anxiety around missing deadlines is to really dig into your beliefs about what deadlines signal About you and about the world around you and notice how you might be using them as a way of avoiding dealing with deeper fears. Speaking from personal experience, I don't love the feeling of not hitting a deadline.
There was a period in my life where I prided myself on always hitting deadlines, no matter what it took. Now I just think about that and feel like, ugh. I push back deadlines all of the time, and I've never seen anything catastrophic happen as a result. Pushing back deadlines is one of the luxuries of being an indie author, and yes, [00:26:00] I've That means I set deadlines for myself, but they're as malleable as can be, because I have been humbled, more times than I can count, by my own ambition as it runs face first into the brick wall of reality.
So rather than deadlines, I create more of like production schedules that are designed to be easily pushed backward if I need that, and I usually need that. I intended to start recording this podcast, for instance, about four months earlier than I actually started recording it. Would I have liked to hit that deadline?
That malleable deadline? Well, no, actually, when I think about it, the deadline hitter part of me is like, yeah, I would have loved that. But the wise part of me says, no, I didn't want to hit that. My dog died right around that time. And I couldn't think straight. That wouldn't have made a very good podcast. I would have sounded like a raving, you know, lunatic over here. I would have been crying too many [00:27:00] times in between, sentences. So yeah, I'm actually really grateful for my developed ability to cut myself some slack around deadlines. And I really emphasize that this is a developed ability, this is a muscle that I've built. It meant that I could mourn when I needed to and still return to the project when I was ready without feeling like I was already behind or had somehow failed.
I'm going to leave you with this. We're in the heart of wildflower season in Austin, as I record this episode. And I think a lot about how that season changes each year. Nature doesn't have any deadlines. It has these natural flows. We don't get mad at the bluebonnets if they're not blooming by a certain date.
Instead, we sit and we wait with anticipation, knowing, having faith that they'll bloom when [00:28:00] they're ready to bloom. And when that happens, we celebrate and delight them. in the existence of the bluebonnets. We recognize that it's bluebonnet season, and then families go and take pictures in them. No one is mad about any delay in it, because we understand that the blooms are so dependent on conditions.
Conditions they can't control, like rain and sunshine and temperatures. They bloom when they're ready. And then we just fuckin frolic when they do. So, you, too, are actually dependent on the conditions around you that you can't control. So what if instead of letting our hubris convince us that we have the ultimate control over our life, we instead respected that the conditions might not have been right just yet for our manuscript to come to fruition?
And when those conditions are met, and our stories bloom, you, too, What if we just allow ourselves to pause, enjoy the moment, and [00:29:00] celebrate? So set the deadlines if they give you a sense of peace for now, or a target to shoot for, but hold them lightly. And don't let them tell you who you are and what you're capable of.
Do what you can to stay connected to yourself, to your story, and your purpose for writing. And then you can trust that the book will be ready when it's meant to be ready. So that's it for this episode. If you want to reach out to me, email me at contact@FFS.media, or check out how we can work together at FFS.media. Thanks for listening. And I'll be back with another episode for you soon. I'm not committing to a deadline for it though.