be adequate and finish things, try not to be perfect

I managed to make fair to good progress in my proposal writing this week. My twelve proposals (gasp!) are due next Friday and I have them all pretty well finished with only some hole-filling remaining. I did this primarily by purging words onto a page to get the gist of the research idea outlined and then re-writing and refining afterwards. This is a faster and more gratifying technique than my previous laborious technique of crafting each sentence before moving on to the next sentence. I still spend more than the warranted amount of time on each proposal, checking for ease of reading, grammatical perfection, and formatting. But it’s progress, I think. I hope to have all of the proposals ready to submit by Monday.

This seems so wrong…aim for mediocrity, get ‘er done, quantity over quality….all that. But for some people, like myself, this is the only way I’ll get the unimportant-yet-urgent things out of the way so that I can focus on the truly-important-but-seemingly-less-urgent items that are forever getting pushed to the end of my To Do list.

I’m glad I ran across this goal while checking out Turandot 43 Things. Thanks.