My Shameful Confession

08Jul11

My name is Claire Brown, and I am a procrastinator.

I admit, that I have a HORRIBLE… I mean HORRIBLE habit that I am trying to break. My lack of punctuality. Yeah… this might be the worst quality to have as a free lance designer. Deadlines are a pretty important thing, and when you’re juggling a bunch of projects, or a really great project comes up while you’re already working on some other ones, it’s really nice to already be on schedule with said other projects so the stress doesn’t consume you, and your mind is free to be creative. That’s what I imagine it’s like anyway – I am usually behind and have this immense stress-guilt complex that pushes me to finish, and then apologize profusely to my clients.  I have had the glorious fortune to work with some really great people, who have not (yet) gotten mad at me (at least to my face/via my inbox) about this character deficiency of mine. If you are in school, ESPECIALLY studying art.. PRACTICE GOOD HABITS!! Get to class on time; get your work done 3 days before it’s due so you can do all that nit-picky refining. DO IT! You will thank yourself later.

Today, I was rushing on a project…

and from 8am to.. well.. 20 minutes ago, I took this:

a 20% done project with a horrible layout scheme, and refined it into this:

a 85% done piece, with a decent layout scheme, with just a few things to finish up. It is amazing what can get done in a day. I can do 65% of a piece in a day, but it suuuuuucccckkksss… I am sitting in my office ALL day. Yesterday was torture, it was 85-degrees, and the pool at my apartment complex was kid free most of the day. Usually, I have to do an all-nighter to finish projects because my bad habit is so awful. While I used to equate those to being a  stamp of being a hardcore designer, now it’s just punishment for idiocy. So, blogosphere, I pledge to have a better work ethic. And if pledges don’t work, I’m sure a clause in my contract promising a 10% refund for every day a project is late probably will get me a little motivated.

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Filed under: design, learning   |  2 Comments
Tags: freelance design, habits, procrastination