Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Time stays,
we go.
One of the things we need to do to get anything done is to set a mental due date. It sounds obvious, but a lot of good never gets started because the due date isn’t set, or started but never finished.
In fact, it can be easy to be addicted to new starts, but knowing how to plow through, how to finish, that can be the challenge.
Those that do this already probably don’t need the reminder. Maybe a pinch of the opposite. But others may profit from the push.
Also, note that I said hold yourself to it. With others, you may need another discipline: a bit of grace and patience.
In setting your dates, be realistic. Know how long things take. Set the projected completion date, then work backwards with the steps, scheduling increments of progress. These, then, are mini-due dates.
Though it makes a slightly different point, I’ve always liked a quote by Henri Matisse: “When I found my true path, I took fright, realizing that I could not turn back. So I charged ahead into my work with my head down, following the principle that all my life I had understood by the words, ‘Hurry up?”*
There was a man who was called. In the end he produced thousands of works. I don’t doubt that he was working with self-imposed due dates in is mind all the time.
It matters what we do, and if we don’t schedule it, little happens. “Time,” I once read, “is the chrysalis of eternity.”
In eternity there are no due dates.
But today is another matter.
______
*Matisse, A Retrospective, Jack Flam, Wing Books, New York
Our Lives Together
Its About Life
8:42 pm
Awesome Hyatt!! Got to go….have a few imminent due dates looming.
11:01 pm
A degree of structure has to be Scriptural. Francis Shaeffer, an author I read a lot of during my college years, talked about “freedom within form.” When external boundaries/time commitments/your due-dates included, are put into place, there’s a sense of safety from where we all know we’d stray to, if left on our own. I speak for myself here!
12:47 pm
You are the master of continual self-motivation and this blog defines it. Self-imposed due dates are the most important and rewarding of all! Thanks for sharing the method and the challenge.
9:12 pm
I need this. Not sure I will do this. (Kick me.) You could add this min-series to your other one on painting and keeping a space set up – know what I’m referring to?
4:23 pm
To Do lists don’t work.
Schedules do.
Put a date on it.