I know it’s unhealthy. I know it’s just an excuse for being unorganized…but I just can’t help it: I’m a deadline junkie. It’s one of those truths I’ve just had to own up to like the fact that life is better caffinated and that I’ll probably never learn to play piano. Ever since High School I have had to make supreme efforts not to leave everything to the last minute. In the run up to my Bachelor’s dissertation I hardly slept at all. Not because I particularly wanted to find out what it felt like but because I had no choice. I’d simply left too much too late.
Digital technology has made a lot of things simpler in journalism just as everywhere else. At the same time I can’t help but wonder what I would have done if I’d been forced to type out 15,000 words on a typewriter. Would I have been more organized or would I have given up on academia long ago and gone for something where I could actually start making money before hitting 30?
Truth be told sitting in front of my laptop at 6:34am, after spending a night writing a newspaper article I can’t help but feel that life might have been simpler then. Of course that’s one of the luxuries I accord myself, namely not dwelling of the moronic quality of my entirely pointless and almost painfully self indulgent fantasy.
Or maybe we should go even further back. How much last minute editing can you do when you’re chiselling letters into a marble slab worth twice as much as your life? My guess is; not much.
EG
