It turns out work is a true feast or famine situation right now; after a couple of relatively laidback weeks in terms of short-term, immediate projects, allowing me to work on the Secret Thing That I Should Probably Get Back To, No, For Real (not to mention, just after me writing about things being slow lately), I find myself surprisingly underwater in terms of other gigs that are needed right now.
It’s a good problem to have, I should clarify; just earlier this week, I found myself thinking about how good I’d be if it turned out that this week saw almost no freelance money come in, telling myself that this longterm project would pay off in… well, the longterm, and that I just needed to be patient and not stress about money. (This is, I should add, pretty much the mantra I’ve had this year since THR went away, mostly because if I stop and think about the money too much, I get twitchy.) Now, out of nowhere, I have a rush of gigs and find myself juggling to fit them all in.
The funny/strange part of it is trying to talk my brain into accepting what needs to be done and when. Today, for example, I got two different gigs that both needed to be handed in at the end of the day, which means that I needed to write them immediately. The problem being that my brain had already decided that it wanted to work more on the longterm project and had very little interest in anything else.
In my years of doing this job, I’ve developed a reasonable amount of tactics to push myself back on task, or at least find ways to get myself thinking about a particular topic when that topic is the very thing that I need to be thinking about. Unfortunately, those tricks work best when I’m not getting other messages about other jobs that have a tight turnaround that I should also be thinking about at that very moment.
…I should get back to what I’m supposed to be doing, shouldn’t I?