Carbo-loading

In her novel BreakupBabe, blogger and dater extraordinaire Rebecca Agiewich has her protagonist Rachel suit up in what she hilariously refers to as the “editing straitjacket” any time she has a killer deadline at her technical editing gig. Without the figurative straitjacket, Rachel would be hopelessly lost to an afternoon of emailing friends about her dating woes and incessantly checking her blog for new comments.

Even though I’m happy with the projects I’m working on, I can so, so relate to the editing straitjacket concept. It’s just too damn easy to get sidetracked from the task at hand when you work solo at home, free from the threat of some boss poking her head in to check up on “how that article’s coming.”

I wrote about work habits and procrastination busters a lot in — shameless plug alert — The Book. But since The Book won’t be out for a couple months, I’d like to share with you Anti-Procrastination tip #29, one which I had to employ repeatedly this past week, seeing that I was inundated with more work than I knew what to do with:

It’s called Writing for Ho Hos, or as one freelancer I interviewed for the book called it, The Delayed Gratification Game. See, I suffer from a baked goods addiction. Normally, when life’s humming along smoothly and I’m juggling my work and my personal life just fine, thank you very much, I get my pastry fix via the faux-healthy vegan cookie, donut, and brownie offerings at my neighborhood Whole Foods or PCC Natural Market. But once my workload reaches “Are you effing kidding me?!?!” thresholds, my standards plumet and I pay a visit or two or three to the Safeway snack aisle. In fact, I need my crap food to keep me going the way Popeye needs his E. coli-free spinach.

This past week the stress level racheted up so high, I devoured multiple bags, boxes, and styrofoam containers of pretzel rods, Ho Hos, and chow mein from the Safeway take-out counter. (To my credit, I did stop short of consuming fried pork rinds.) However, I reserved my carbo-loading sessions for my work breaks. In other words, no pretzels and processed baked goods and nasty Chinese food until I’d spent at least two to three hours in the writing straitjacket first. And since I wanted my crap snacks baaaaaaad, I worked my heinie off.

I was happy to learn I’m not the only freelancer who lives and dies by the “will work for junk food” credo. Emily, a fab pet photographer I’m collaborating with this month, says that if she has a mountain of dark room work ahead of her, she’ll indulge in a vat of ice cream and treat herself to a few spoonfuls after each stretch of work. My office manager, too, seems to eat more rawhide bones when we’re slammed around here, but I suspect he’d gleefully mow on them even during our slow weeks.

Alas, my reward system reached new lows late last week when I found myself ordering a breakfast sandwich in Subway (and realized I’d actually earned enough points on my Subway card to land me that sandwich free of charge). Not only did my breakfast sandwich feature a spongelike yellow rectangle that doubled as prefab cooked egg, it had no discernible taste, save for the burnt bun it came on. I would have preferred a tasty McMuffin, 3500 calories be damned.

Realizing that Oprah — Self-Proclaimed President of Emotional Eaters Anonymous — would have a field day with me, I vowed to find a healthier reward system for those tricky workweeks when I’m up to my eyeballs in deadlines. I’m testing out a new program now, called Devouring the YouTube Videos of Aging Rockstars in Their 1960s/1970s Heyday. Basically I work an hour or two or three, and then I dig up some juicy nugget from YouTube’s vast arsenal of folk/hippie/prog/glam/classic rockers. For instance, who knew Peter Gabriel once looked like this?

Now if I could just pry myself away from the computer…

Add comment October 8th, 2006