My initiative does not condone your procrastination!

The BBQ Pit
1

My book project (not NaNoWriMo) is suffering some delays. The class project (to make a children’s book) took a long time to get off the ground in the first place, because none of my partners really took the initiative to come up with concepts. Thus, I had to come up wtih a lot of the ideas. I really wish the other group members would contribute some ideas and not just sit back and say “tell me what to do”.

We meet about every Friday, and I have been frustrated to discover that I’m the only one that has anything to show for this project up until lately. So far I have written a couple of drafts, and the group member in charge of editing has helped me cut it down in length and improve the language of the manuscript. She is actually the exception here- probably because she has realized the same thing I had known all month: Unless we are all proactive about completing this project, it will never get done on time. I was pretty upset last week when I found out that the illustrators of the book haven’t gotten anything done. I told them that they can’t wait for the manuscript to be finished- I already e-mailed them about the plot of the book, and parts of the book that will not change in the next round of drafts. I also talked to the professor about this problem, and she suggested I become much more assertive about everybody doing their job.

I didn’t really want the role of taskmaster, it was kind of forced on me. Each of us has a stake in this grade-wise, so there is no reason some people could just sit on their hands. Some of them gave me the excuse “But I have work/miderms in other class/etc.” Well you know what? So do I, and that hasn’t stopped me from giving them progress reports on the manuscript and suggestions to everybody to start coming up with ideas while I am writing, not when I am finished.

The book will get done on schedule, despite the hang-ups. I’m confident the other group members will get on the ball when they realize that they are jeopardizing 20% of their grade. But this is something far too important to be procrastinating about! :mad:

2

Are you sure? Some people don’t really care that much for their grades.

I had a simiar situation back in college, but luckily out of the group, it was only 1 who refused to do any work (it was a psych lab class). In fact, we had figured she had dropped the class when she didn’t show to our meetings and then, when almost everything had been worked out, she showed up expecting to take part!

3

No, these people are on top of the rest of the coursework, it is more a matter of priority- I think the book project is more important than they do. Thus, I’m pretty confident they’ll come through (though I am prepared to put together a contingency plan NOW in the rare event they do flake out). They just feel that their own schoolwork takes precedence over a ‘group’ project.

Both my editor and I prefer to work solo on projects if that is an option (it wasn’t in this case) and so we have had to swallow our pride and do everything we can to work as a team. I’m not enthusiastic about having a finished product completed 6 hours before it is due- I’d much rather have it done a WEEK ahead of time to cover any unexpected problems/typos/etc