Sunday evening again

It's Sunday evening. The proposal is due a week on Friday at five o'clock. You've had the brief for three weeks. Here's how those weeks might have gone, as an example and not a promise.

The brief came in on a Monday. That afternoon you spent fifteen minutes on a version so bad you'd have been mortified if anyone had seen it. It had seven headings. Under "Budget" it said NO IDEA, ASK FINANCE. So on Tuesday you asked finance, and the figures took them eight days. Under the old system that delay would have sunk you, and you wouldn't have known it was coming until the last night.

There were four sessions of an hour and a half, and one that you skipped and rebooked. On day six an idea about the second aim arrived on the walk to the station, from nowhere, except that it wasn't from nowhere. On Wednesday a colleague read the draft and told you the third section lost her. She was right, and there was time to fix it.

So now it's Sunday evening and the thing is nearly done. You aren't a different person. You felt the swerve at the start of most sessions, and once, in the second week, it won for three days. The work isn't perfect, but it's better than last time in ways you can point to, because this time it got a second pass, a reader and a night's sleep.

The bigger difference is the evenings, and this one is an example. The proposal isn't in the room.

I can't promise it goes like that. Some pieces of work will still get away from you, and some weeks the old habit will be stronger than the new one. What I'm confident of is smaller. The delay was never about laziness. It was about not wanting to be measured, and a start that's meant to be bad lets you begin without being measured.

One action, then. You've had a piece of work in mind since chapter 1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Open the real document, or create it, and write a bad version of the whole thing. Put one line at the top saying what comes next. Then close it, and have your evening.