Weeklies

I am not good at managing time. This is an absolute truth and one I wish to change. It is especially bad when you work at a job that involves deadlines, writing (creatively) on deadline, hard deadlines and often office-less work. I am always tempted to just pack up my things and say, “I’ll take care of it from home.” That is both a non-winning strategy and a horrible lie.When I first began working for the newspaper I chidded my boss for being so strict about only working out the office.

While I’m not ready to concede my ground completely–reaching people is often best done in the evening–I will admit that his principal is correct. I just don’t get much done from home and I tend to fill the hours I get with work. Thus, a writing assignment that ought to take 3 hours, and will if I’m only in the office for 8 hours a day, will bleed over into 24 hours of thinking, writing snippets, imagning more effective ways of working and ultimately not getting anything finished.

Now, I will admit this may be 99% character flaw, but my bosses philisophical opposition to the “home office” method suggests there is more than 1% of objective truth to the supposition. As someone recently pointed out at a school board meeting where the question was to extend a custodian’s hours to better clean teh school, “certain jobs will not necessarily improve with added time. Instead the job will simply expand to fill more hours.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the point is there. Especially when the issue of creativty creeps in, I feel as though hard and fast deadlines set by things like hours in the office are requisite to just getting things done. Unbridaled creativity is a powerful and aimless force. Journalism is both an exercise in creativty and just getting things done. I just need to learn to keep my balance on this line.