Procrastination!? What Procrastination?

By Danielle Jackson

I don’t think I’m alone if I say that once you work in publishing, procrastination goes out the window. There’s literally no time to even think about procrastinating. As many of you know, publishing is a HUGE group effort—from our copy editors to our designers to our web team to our authors, it takes a lot of people to make one book… and Sourcebooks publishes around 300 books a year! Just think about what would happen if ONE person were to push things aside and put even the smallest kink in the process…

Luckily, we’re pretty efficient over here at Sourcebooks (and that’s not to say that there haven’t been issues with late books or cover re-designs at the last minute), and even when something does have to be arranged differently, we stay flexible to make the proper changes.

However, I do find small ways to procrastinate, in ways that won’t be detrimental to our publishing machine (which is wild and crazy and generally makes no sense):

-I won’t answer an email right away. A lot of you tell me I’m ridiculously fast with returning emails. The truth of the matter is, I’m OCD about that little Outlook envelop in my bottom right hand screen corner—for some reason I HATE IT. So I check emails to get rid of that envelope. However, in recent months, I’ve gotten “better” about letting things sit… for a few minutes at least.

- I rewrite my to-do list. I make an insane amount of to-do lists. I make one for each week every Monday morning, and usually make one each day. But then, I also make one throughout the current week, to plan for the following week. No, Seriously. I do. But when there’s a mountain of press materials that need to be written, or reports to be double-checked, I re-write one of my to-do lists, because, well, I’m just making sure I’m doing what I need to be doing!

- I read books! I think this goes without saying—when you work for a publisher, and you just so happen to love reading, you can’t really get in trouble for saying you’re reading, right? Because it’s an essential part of your job! :-)

- I hang out with a bunch of smart ladies, who have great ideas! So I might not start out talking to my colleagues (and currently, our all-star PR team is a total girls’ club—awesome!!) about a great marketing idea, and I know a few authors who like to chit chat in their emails throughout the day, but you never know what can happen when you start talking about Toasted Almond Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee (dee-lish, btw) and end up with an idea for an email blast to librarians.

Admittedly, I have never really been one for procrastinating—it rides on my conscience too much when I know I should probably just finish something instead of checking Facebook all day (though, I do have to do that for my job, and by the by, I end up checking my own page)!

Are there certain things you almost procrastinate about? Or would you rather have that added pressure when you’ve put it off long enough, and you know you have to get it done?