I’ve officially joined Project52, a collective challenge for blog writers to write one post every week for an entire year. It was originally envisioned as just a little competition among 20 or so friends, but it’s recently exploded past the 700-member mark (more proof that word-of-mouth is the best – and freest – form of marketing).
The idea of required artistic responsibility (otherwise known as “The Deadline”) is new to no one, and yet we often forget how potent it can be. There’s a reason we all wrote so many papers in college – we had to. (Or, in some cases, bought them from shady websites… I speak of other people, of course. I was nowhere near shady. More on the sunny side.) In fact, I recently had an eye-opening experience with deadlines while developing shortcts.in with three friends at an overnight hackathon. The goal was to develop a web application in approximately 24 hours, and in doing so, I had perhaps the best team development experience of my life. “Agile” took on new meaning as we reached maximum velocity and cast aside the time-wasting “planning” phase in favor of pure, delicious implementation. As my team member Dave said at the time, “Why discuss when you can just do?” Well, I may be paraphrasing/alliterating that for the sake of epic impact, but the idea was clear. We would have missed out on that sublime clear-mindedness had we not had a ridiculous deadline looming over our head.
Let’s just say that that having time is inversely related to productivity. Really, We should all be doing Project365. Then again, sometimes you just have to stop working and play Dragon Age until 5am… not that I’ve ever done that, of course.
Deadlines are magic, take it from me. Good luck!