[Cheery Blossoms in Sendai, Japan :: Photo taken last week]

Say you've been out of your studio for most of the month, and when you finally get back and have a nice long stretch of time in front of you to tackle all the ideas you came up with while you were away, you look at your calendar and realize you have three deadlines at the end of the month.  What do you do?  Tackle each task one by one until each is completed?  Create a priority list with sub-lists of ancillary priorities and tasks?  Put together a daily itinerary?

No!  You do all these other things…

Step 1:  Spend most of your first day working on an entirely new blog, which must be totally unrelated to any of the projects that have this end of the month deadline.  Create your blog banner, write your first few entries, work on the layout.  (By the way – I see a few of you managed to find this blog even though I never made it public – how is this possible?  Pretend you haven't already read a couple of future entries here.)

Step 2:  Change your mind!  Decide not to continue with this new blog, but instead spend most of the day re-designing your existing blog.  Add new icons, create a new banner, and create a new category list – which then means you must go through all entries written this year and add a category classification.  Don't skimp out – take the time to make it perfect.

Step 3:  Once your new blog is up and running and fabulous, go through all of your writing files.  Decide that you don't like the way you organized your file names and folders, re-shuffle everything and give most of your files new file names that all adhere to your shiny new system.

Step 4:  After weeks of getting a message from your hard drive – that zillion gigabyte hard drive you purchased that couldn't possibly ever get full – that it is, indeed, full, decide it's high time to go through all the files on the hard drive and unload anything unnecessary.  Learn that because your computer backs up your files multiple times a day, there is a long list of folders with all of your backups since the dawn of time.  Decide to throw away most of those files and update files individually.  Discover that there are more than 500,000 files that need to be deleted, and that this will take almost two hours. 

Step 5:  During those two hours – by all means – do not – I repeat – do not give any attention to any of the projects that have a deadline that is barely a week away.  Get caught up on your friends' blogs, ditto for Cute Overload, then spend some time on Facebook and read a magazine article or two.

Step 6:  The next day, since you'll be out anyway for a morning appointment, go to your favorite new breakfast joint for a fried egg sandwich and your second cafe au lait for the day.  Why not?  You've worked hard – you deserve a break.

Step 7:  When you get back home, all pumped up on caffeine and bacon, write a blog entry such as this one – anything to avoid getting to work on those projects which now have a deadline that is one day closer than it was yesterday, and two days closer than the day before.

Any questions?  Go ahead, just ask me, I've got all the time in the world.