Do you need to be nagged?

Here’s a link to a wonderful little website I came across the other day, called hassleme. The idea is simple: You enter the text of something you want to be nagged about on a regular basis. You specify the number of days between nags. Then you receive an email every time that number of days passes, or thereabouts, telling you to call your mum, go for a walk or whatever it is you wanted to be prodded into doing.

In itself a cute idea, but perhaps there’s something to learn here as well.

How about being ordered, unexpectedly, every twenty days or so, to drop everything and spend half an hour brainstorming a completely new story?

How often do you have an idea but tell yourself you’re too busy to waste time imagining some new endeavour because you’re up to your ears in your current work? Probably too often. And yet there’s nothing more reassuring (other than a very fat bank account, perhaps) than having a healthy stock of original ideas up your sleeve.

It's not just reassuring, it makes good professional sense too.

You never know when you might be able to pitch an idea or to whom. It’s always good to have a choice of projects to hawk rather than just that single script you’ve been rewriting for seven years.

Anyway, I’ve set up precisely the hassle I described above. No doubt I’ll have forgotten all about it when the first nag arrives in a few weeks’ time. I’ll let you know what happens…