Here’s the problem I was facing: a December 1 deadline for a proposal to do a conference presentation in the spring.

And here’s what’s amazing: despite a really tough struggle with inertia, I just sent it off.

Maybe the problem was the holiday preparations (we’ve shipped all our gifts and done most of our decorating). Maybe I just needed a break. Or it might be simply that I lost my momentum when I stopped thinking about writing and started focusing on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Whatever it was, I couldn’t get past it…until yesterday, when I used a favorite trick to get my writing engine started – two tricks, actually.

The first was a reward (or self-imposed threat, depending on how you look at it). A friend loaned me a crime novel that I was eager to read – Hell Fire by Karin Fossum. I told myself that I couldn’t start reading it until I’d spent some time on the proposal. (And now that I’ve read the book, I kind of wish I hadn’t: it’s sad.)

The second strategy was something that time management experts call a “leading task” – a non-threatening chore to get myself moving. I challenged myself to type some quotations I wanted to use in my proposal.

Total time invested: about 20 minutes. Bonus: I was so proud of myself – and so energized – that I drafted almost the entire proposal in one sitting. I was typing away, starting to really get into it, and I suddenly realized that I had my required 250 words.

That was yesterday. Today I did some revising and then sent it off.

Now comes the fun part – putting a PowerPoint together. The presentation is about Village Wooing, a playlet by Bernard Shaw about a man and woman who meet on a cruise ship and eventually decide to get married.

I’ve already found a picture of two deck chairs to use in my presentation!