For the last year or more, my plan for this blog has been to post something every Monday. For the most part, I’ve been good about that, but there have definitely been times when that Monday deadline has slipped. Today is Thursday and I haven’t posted for this week, making me several days behind.
The reasons for my delay are minor—nothing particularly bad prevented me from writing a blog post in the last several days. On Sunday, I could have written a blog post, but I chose to spend my time writing fiction instead. That was not necessarily the best choice–I’m not really a fiction writer, having chosen to (mostly) focus my efforts on non-fiction projects. (I generally try to focus my efforts so that I can finish projects, and I think my non-fiction projects are better in quality and more marketable than my fiction, so when it comes to trying to finish something, the non-ficiton gets priority.)
But the delay does give me a subject: what to do when you miss targets. (I have plenty of other potential subjects, actually, but this one seems the most apt for a day when I’m behind schedule. It is necessary to choose a specific topic, and follow it, rather than vacillating between different possible topics.)
So, what do I do when I miss targets? Basically, I don’t do anything special. And that’s really what I want to suggest as the main point of this post: don’t let missing a target throw you. Don’t let it stop you, and don’t let it slow you down. If you miss a target, the thing to do is to focus your attention on the writing project and to get back to writing. Realistically, if you miss a target, the only way to recover from that is to get back to work and to keep working to try to find a resolution for that miss.
What you (and I) don’t want to do after missing a target, is to focus your (or my) attention on the fact that the target was missed. Turning attention to the writing project, gets you back on course toward whatever larger target you had been aiming for. Turning attention to the missed target doesn’t focus on what you want to create, it focuses attention on other things. If your goal is to create a piece of writing, it is crucial to keep your attention focused on the ideas that you want to express. If you start thinking about missing a target, not only is your effort distracted from what you want to create, but there’s a good chance that you will also have negative thoughts about yourself and your own work patterns.
Writing, writing well, and finishing writing projects, all require a big investment of effort. It’s much easier to apply that effort if you are in a more positive emotional state. And it’s much easier to apply that effort if your attention is focused on the thing you’re trying to create instead of some personal failing.
In a way, this recommendation (keep trying; keep focusing on your project, even if you miss a target) is little more than saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But it’s worth saying, I think, partly because the familiar aphorism is so familiar that it loses impact. And worth saying partly because the aphorism doesn’t contain any reasoning as to why it’s a good idea.
You might argue that my missing a self-imposed deadline for my own blog is very different from missing a target for a grant, for example, where that failure has significant impact. If I miss a blog post, nothing really happens to me. Regular readers of my blog might be disappointed by the delay; they might even stop following my blog, but there is no clear and direct negative impact similar to what might occur if, for example, you miss a deadline for a grant proposal, for coursework, or for filing a dissertation or thesis. There is certainly truth in such arguments, but that’s at a small scale: yes, the immediate impact of failing to meet some targets is greater than for others. But on the large scale, the basic principle remains sound. If you fail to get your grant proposal submitted on time, does that really change who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish? Or is that just a setback that makes it harder for you to pursue that goal?
There are times, of course, when failing to meet a target is a sign that you might want to find something else to pursue. But that’s a larger question, I think. It’s true that you want to use feedback about your performance to decide whether to pursue some course of action. But is missing a writing deadline a relevant reflection of your ability? I would argue that it is not. If you submit something, and it gets rejected, then it’s totally appropriate to look at that feedback for guidance on whether to continue to pursue your goal—this is especially true where there are hard and fast criteria for judgement—a runner trying to make a national Olympic team whose best times are minutes short of qualifying should think carefully about whether they will be able to shave those minutes off their time in the future. But that’s a judgement based on reaching a target, at least in a certain way: the runner who completes a race too slowly has finished the race—so it’s a situation more akin to a writer who submits a paper that gets rejected than to the situation of a writer who misses a deadline and submits nothing. (And, it should be noted that getting a piece of writing rejected is not something that depends on clear criteria—judging writing is much more personal than comparing a runner’s time to some objective standard.)
In this post, I’m most concerned with the emotional impact of being late, of missing a deadline, not of missing a performance criterion. In my experience, it’s pretty common for people who miss some sort of deadline to spend time and effort berating themselves for the failure to meet the deadline, and it’s really that dynamic that this post hopes to prevent. Missing a deadline is not the end of the world. Missing a deadline is just a delay. I failed to post on Monday, and I planned, but I can still post today. I can still post another post next Monday. If, for example, you missed a deadline to file your dissertation this month, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make the next deadline to file it. (Yes, for some people, there is a final chance to submit—some deadline set by a school that cannot be appealed—and such a deadline obviously is consequential in a different way from missing your target of filing this semester but them having to file next semester instead.) A lot of missed targets are not terminal issues, and for such targets, it’s best to focus attention on next steps and on continuing your project, regardless of having missed the target. I think this especially true for people with big projects: if you miss some target in the course of working—you don’t finish a chapter on time, for example—it’s crucial not to let that miss keep you from working.
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