What About Those Deadlines?

How do you feel about deadlines?

Personally, I’ve never been a fan. Not of tight deadlines, at least. The thought of being a journalist working on a 24-hour cycle of researching and writing stories gives me nightmares. Even when I was in school, I’d write down the due-date for papers a day or two earlier than they were needed, just so I’d have a cushion built-in for catastrophes.

Deadlines aren’t all bad.

Still … even I have to admit that there’s something to be said for deadlines. They give you a reason, a time frame for getting things done. You need to get things ready for the printer to have time before the magazine goes to press. You need to get your copy to a client so he can get his marketing promotion out on time. An editor needs your work to show her publisher.

When you have no deadlines at all … “I’ll finish my novel someday.” … it’s amazing how long the work can be stretched. You take breaks to chat on the phone. You’re tired after a long day, so you decide to skip writing for now. You’ve got errands to run and decide they are more pressing. Suddenly, it’s been months, or even years, and you’re still working on the same thing, tweaking commas, nit-picking adjectives, and your manuscript is never going to be done.

Deadlines can provide incentive.

One of the reasons challenges like NaNoWriMo have become so popular is that they impose specific deadlines on the writers. Get a whole novel written in 30 days? Well, suddenly there’s no time for dawdling! You chain yourself to your desk chair and suddenly are amazed at how much you can get done when you actually apply yourself.

Sometimes the clock provides its own deadline.

Are you trying to get your article done before your toddler wakes up from her nap? Are you tapping away at your novel at 11:30, trying to squeeze out a few pages before your eyelids insist on shutting for the day? Or maybe you’ve got fifteen minutes before your train leaves and you pull out your notebook to draft out your next blog post.

Sometimes, the only deadline you need is the knowledge that your precious, free moments are ticking away. You’ve been frittering away your time on Twitter or Facebook, reading your RSS feeds, browsing websites, and you realize you’ve only got half an hour before you need to turn off the computer. Cripes! Hurry, you can get at least a few hundred words pounded out before then.

This is what happens to me, I find. I can dawdle my way through my day, wasting way too much time checking my email or curling up with a book, and then bound into action like a superhero at a cry for help, simply because the precious resource I’ve been wasting is almost gone.

(We won’t discuss the occasional slow afternoon at my day job, when I sometimes open up Word and type away, just because it’s stolen time and must be used as if it’s extra precious, extra valuable. Because, of course, doing that would be wrong.)

How do you feel about deadlines?

How about you? Do you love deadlines? Dread them? Find a difference between external ones from clients and ones you’ve given yourself?