There are two distinctly different approaches to getting things done: There are the noble early birds who like a good lead time and believe that if you’re five minutes early, you’re ten minutes late. And then there are the clutch performers who thrive under pressure and love a good deadline, especially if they get to do jazz hands and yell “Ta-Da!” as the clock strikes midnight. Where do the Chicks fall on the spectrum? Let’s find out!

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 Ellen Byron

I am SUCH an early bird. I start packing for conventions a month before departure. No joke. I get to the airport at least two hours early — even earlier is better! In fact, I may be at the airport as you read this. Given the partial shutdown, my plan was to arrive four hours early for a flight to Tucson for the Tucson Festival of Books. When someone says, “Let’s meet at five,” I am there at five, if not earlier, and begin to tap my foot if they haven’t shown up by 5:01.

You think I’m bad? Get a load of my mother on this issue. My father once called me from JFK to complain that they’d arrived for a flight EIGHT HOURS EARLY. The airline employees weren’t even on deck yet. Our daughter Eliza was with Mom when her friend Lowen, who was picking them up for dinner at 6 p.m., was not there by 6:04. Mom told Eliza she had to call 911 because she was convinced something happened to her friend. Talk about learned behavior!

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Jennifer Chow

OK, so I’m a last-minute person for punctuality. In our household, one of my kids named it “Chow time,” which means you need to tack on another fifteen minutes on top of the expected arrival hour. And this individual also sneakily gives us the wrong time (say, half an hour earlier), so our family doesn’t show up un-fashionably late. In regard to writing, though, I’m an early bird. I like to set internal deadlines earlier than scheduled due dates—I want to make sure I don’t mess up the publication schedule!  

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Marla Cooper

It started back in college when I would cram for my exams at the last minute. Oh the all-nighters I would pull! When I worked in advertising, everything was very fast-paced and deadline-driven, so that just reinforced my habits. I feel like I should put in a solid defense of how it’s a byproduct of piling my plate too high at the buffet of life, but who am I kidding? I’m consistently running in the door at the last minute saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” I feel like getting to the airport an hour before departure is perfectly reasonable, and I’m much more likely to make it 45 minutes than I am to get there two hours ahead of time. Occasionally, I vow to do better, but secretly? I think I like the adrenaline thrill of the eleventh-hour victory. 

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Well, guess who’s the last Chick to post her answer to this chat?I have been Last Minute Lisa since high school. I do try hard not to be inconsiderate of others, and I am very careful not to be late to appointments or events. Marla and I would have been great college roommates, burning the midnight oil together. My actual roommate, bless her, used to type my papers for $1/page. I literally passed my handwritten pages to her as I finished them. (I had to learn to type quickly and perfectly after graduation to get a job in publishing, ha.) But I’m never really procrastinating–I continually run through tasks and write things in my head until zero hour. I complete one draft of a ms., and I rarely go back. Adrenaline forces me into laser focus, I guess, and it’s nearly impossible for me to summon otherwise. Believe me, I have tried to change my process. But last year, I became completely blocked on a project, and missed a major deadline. I was devastated. Now I check my to-do lists all day long and listen to Nancy Meyer movie playlists (You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, The Holiday, etc.) to help trick myself to get things done sooner. (Thanks, Katie Couric, for that tip!)

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Cynthia Kuhn

While I make a great effort to go places early, I somehow never seem to arrive early. Doesn’t seem to be how time should work and yet that’s how it is. And I do often find myself sprinting toward deadlines, but it’s because I’m always juggling too much to get everything done. The old not-enough-hours-in-the-day situation is real!

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Vickie Fee

I spent most of my working life as a newspaper reporter. This means I always had to meet deadlines. But, it also means I often worked up until deadline to get the story. That’s still pretty much my schedule. As a writer, I write frantically until close to the last minute, then I rewrite until the VERY last minute to make it work and SOUND better. I still like to be the one tweaking until the last minute, because as an author I’m still the one putting my name on the final product.

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Leslie Karst

I am such a planner/organizer that I’ve never pulled an all-nighter in my entire life–I’ve never had to. And I tend to turn in my manuscripts to my publisher at least a few weeks early. I was the high school student who would come home from school, immediately do all my homework for the next day, and then spend the rest of the evening/night goofing off. Can you say LISTS? That’s my middle name.

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Patricia Sargeant

I’m an early achiever. I fully subscribe to the philosophy, “To be five minutes early is to be 10 minutes late.” I intensely dislike to keep people waiting. First, it makes me feel rude. I also feel it puts me at a disadvantage. Like Ellen, my siblings and I get that from our mother. Oh, my goodness. Do. Not. Keep. Our. Mother. Waiting. We felt the vibrations of her tension pulsing around her as each minute ticked by. My husband doesn’t share my philosophy. For him, “To be five minutes early is to be wasting five minutes.” Before we travel together, we have a summit to negotiate departure times.

 

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Readers: what about you? Are you Team Early Bird or Team Just-in-the-Nick-of-Time?