The Problem with Deadlines
EPISODE 036: THE PROBLEM WITH DEADLINES
Deadlines are often touted as a powerful constraint for creativity, a tool to help us get stuff done. But too often they aren’t a helpful tool so much as they are a source of guilt and pressure, and I think there might be a better way not only to use deadlines but to replace them with something that’s always helped me ever more. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I missed my last book deadline by about 2 months, but it’s not what you think and before you get all judge-y with me you should know I missed it because I was 2 months early. And yes, I know, it’s not polite to brag, but this is one of the few things I get to be good at. Being on time. Which in my world means being a little early. I’m never going to get a trophy for this so once in a while it feels good to toot my own horn. If it makes you feel better, it hasn’t always been this way. In college I tended to get things in just on time enough that I didn’t freak out, but without much time to spare. It was there that I learned that I work best with a deadline. But it was years later, that I finally figured out I work even better with a start-line and because it’s not infrequently I get emails asking how I manage to get so much done, or for help meeting a deadline, I thought it might be helpful to explore it.
I’m David duChemin and this is episode 036 of A Beautiful Anarchy, my mostly-weekly podcast about the joys and obstacles of the everyday creative life. One of those obstacles for so many of us is getting things done and while I’ve written 32 books in the last 10 years, and I’ve got some ideas that might help you get more done and sooner, it would be a mistake not to include me among those whose daily fight doesn’t in some way include the desire just to put my work off and fall asleep on the couch. Let’s talk about it.
Intro/Music
I know I’m not the only one that finds deadlines a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to motivation. The benefit of deadlines is that we’ve been given, or have given ourselves, a time by which we must be finished something. For those among us with superhuman discipline, and among whose ranks I am not counted, this is where it ends. You need a project done by the 32nd of Febutember, you put it on the calendar, and it happens. Aren’t you lucky. Probably a little smug, too, though I guess you deserve to be.
But there are plenty of problems with deadlines, not the least of which is that they are only as helpful as the ways in which they are used. At best, deadlines are incomplete. They’re just large, looming, best-before dates on responsibility and productivity, and for some of us they’re the source of dread and guilt, and I don’t think the creative life works well when fired by those particular fuels. Some people are also motivated to action by ridicule and I don’t see that being very helpful either. So I’ve got some thoughts on deadlines and while this episode might be among the least poetic of the things I’ve spoken about in our weekly times together, I’m hoping the practicality will serve you.
You’re not the only one that finds it hard to get things done.
The first thought I had when brainstorming this episode was the idea that a deadline is a tool and tools are only as useful as the ways in which we use them, and one of the problems with deadlines is that we don’t use them at all. We simply meet them or we do not. We don’t wield them in service of our goals so much as just let them hang over our heads and remind us of the progress we are not making. And while i know there are people who will say deadlines exert upon them a certain amount of positive pressure to get things done, even if it’s in the final hours before cramming it all in, I wonder how many of those people waste the weeks and months leading up to those deadlines with avoidance tactics, and other ways of escaping the inevitable. It might just be me, and I’m sorry if this sounds judge-y on my part, but if you can get something done in the day before the deadline, imagine how much better you could do if you didn’t drag your feet, imagine how much MORE you could do.
And if you are that kind of person, I want to suggest you consider Parkinson’s Law which suggests that work efforts will expand to fill the time you give them. If you know you’ve got 3 months to write an article or prepare a presentation or whatever thing needs doing on time, and you know you’re going to crank it out in the week leading up to that deadline, then don’t give yourself 3 months. Give yourself a week. And then use the remaining 11 weeks doing something great while the rest of us struggle to get going.
This is one of the reasons I think the deadline might not be the right tool and that a start-line is a stronger approach for many people, especially those of you nodding your heads right now, because you know that deadline is a thing you mostly fear. Or hide from. Or pretend isn’t there.
And here might be as good a place as any to take a brief detour into the bloody history of the word deadline, which didn’t come into common use, according to Merriam-Webster until 1864 when a Confederate prison for Union soldiers was created in Andersonville, Georgia, the dead-line being a light railing around the prison camp beyond which prisoner’s would be shot. Remember that the next time your editor is breathing down your neck or you’re feeling a little queasy as you approach the deadline. As far as metaphors go you couldn’t ask for something with more drama or motivation. I’m not sure if you’re even allowed to have a metaphor within a metaphor, but there must be something in there about those union soldiers longing so hard for freedom, the same kind of freedom they were fighting for on behalf of the enslaved, that they would dare crossing that line.
Once I learned the history of the term I became even more convinced I preferred a start-line.
The start-line is everything. History aside, a deadline looms and it intimidates and it’s vague as hell when what most of us need is not to know when things need to be completed but an actual plan to do so. But a startline says, go, begin, and do it now. In fact I have found I need multiple start-lines because while having a start-line at the beginning and a due date at the end tells me how long I have, that space in between can be really soupy and I could flounder away in there, totally directionless for as much time as you give me. But give me a series of start-lines and I’ve got direction. And I’ll know what my pace needs to look like.
Startlines and the willingness to use many of them allows me to break up my project or work into smaller playing fields. It sounds incredibly disciplined and for those of you more inclined to just, you know, follow the muse whenever she leads you, man, then this probably sounds like a downer. But for me, it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly freeing to know that today, in the case of my writing, all I need to do is make one outline, or write one chapter. Or 500 words. Or just get the canvases ready or work on one song. Knowing what small, manageable task I need to complete just for now, just today or this week, and knowing I’ve actually got the time for it, allows me to play.
It removes the pressure to get it right the first time.
It gives me the luxury of false starts and taking some risks knowing if that risk takes me to a dead-end I’ve got time for a U-turn and I’ll probably have learned something.
Allowing a project to become not one big sprint to the finish line but a series of more relaxed and focused walks to each next step creates buffers so there’s more room to explore the unexpected and to respond to surprises.
It gives more time to refine your work, and if there’s more time to refine the work then there’s also more time and freedom to let it be a little more ugly, playful, and creative at the beginning.
Some people are just deadline people, I get it. But I suspect most of us need more than that. The emails I get and the conversations i have suggest to me that one of the biggest obstacles to everyday creativity is getting things started and if that’s the case it’s not a deadline or due date you need but a start-line.
Start-lines are about possibility of creative work that lies ahead.
Deadlines are about penalties for work that just didn’t get done.
Startlines guide and nudge. Deadlines hover and loom.
But if deadlines are your thing, and look, I know we’re all motivated differently, then at least consider using more of them. Hey, you like deadlines, I’ll give you deadlines. Right now I’m building a new course for photographers and my calendar has about a dozen different start-lines on it, and a dozen smaller due dates for each of those smaller steps once started. I know exactly what I’m doing and when, and there are buffers aplenty built in so none of it overwhelms. How do I know all this? In my world if it’s not on the calendar it doesn’t exist. And my first start-line, with a corresponding dude date, was at the very beginning when I tasked myself with creating a production schedule. That was the first start. Making a plan.
I know, the more capital-C creatives out there just winced and rolled their eyes. As if creativity can be scheduled! As if the muse just shows up when she’s told! Or doesn’t she? Could it be that this reluctance to get serious and more disciplined about how you use your time in creative efforts is exactly the reason you’re bumping up against that deadline in the first place? Could it be that the very long velvet leash on which you’ve placed your muse is just another artsy-sounding excuse not to put your ass in the chair or wherever it is you do your work and get going? My experience is that, in fact, the muse performs like a champion athlete when you put her on a schedule. She gets warmed up faster and into flow faster and because she’s got the freedom of not having to do it all in one go, she can do it better, with more risk and creativity, in smaller pieces.
It was suggested to me once that it’s called art-work, not art-fucking-around.
This is one reason so many incredibly productive and creative people work so well with a routine or a ritual. They make it a habit. They don’t give themselves the luxury of excuses and if there’s some question about the muse showing up, there is no question about them showing up themselves and putting skin in the game everyday, which is probably why they’re as creative as they are: they’ve learned the muse shows up when they do because the muse is them.
Ritual makes the start automatic. Ritual removes the fog created when you give yourself the so-called freedom to decide on a day-to-day basis whether or not you’ll show up and do the work. It takes the emotion out of the decision.
If I only wrote when I felt like it, or when I felt good about things, or had exciting ideas ready to go, I’d still be working on my first book. Maybe. You know, if I got around to it. My own ritual and routine puts the muse on notice and yes, I have production schedules and they don’t sound sexy, hell they often don’t feel sexy. But you know what does feel sexy? Getting to the end of my work everyday and knowing I got today’s work done. And knowing that I’ll be ready tomorrow to get the work for tomorrow done. And when it’s going well, sometimes more than that. Being done my work and not having it hanging over my head playing the guilt game, that feels sexy. Seeing my books finished and on a bookstore shelf. There’s a lifetime of sexy in that.
it’s not always easy, the work doesn’t always go well. Sometimes the schedule, with all its startlines and due dates is a challenge. But that’s not a reason not to do it. In fact, it’s an even better reason to embrace it all the more.
Challenge is a necessary condition for Flow to occur and if you’re not keen on either deadlines or start-lines, then look at this as a challenge: the challenge to begin your work even though conditions aren’t perfect. The challenge to get the first version of your work done by the end of this week. The challenge to focus on this and nothing else for today. Re-frame it if you have to. A schedule that feels like an obligation doesn’t work for me. But see it as a challenge? That works for me. It fires me up.
You’ve got to find what works for you.
Maybe that’s some form of accountability. I know a lot of people, especially those who worked for someone else for many years and now find themselves working at home, without structure, or the accountability of someone who expects more from them, new freelancers and work-at-homers find that hard. If you need accountability, then make it happen. Give your buddy a thousand bucks and tell them to pay you $100 for each micro-deadline you hit and to pocket $150 for each one you miss. Promise yourself a reward or find someone to impose a penalty.
I don’t know what works for you, but I bet you do. Or you can figure it out.
I have one more idea, and this one’s not practical. Not really. But it’s a question that needs to be asked. Do you really not enjoy your creative work enough that it’s this hard to get it done? Could it be that this superhuman struggle just to get things done is a sign that you’re either doing the wrong thing, or doing the right thing half-heartedly or for the wrong reasons?
One of the conditions of flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who first recognized and gave flow its name, is that it occurs when we do something for the pleasure of doing it. He calls these flow experiences autotelic, which means they're an end to themselves, and are intrinsically rewarding.
When we write so that we can be writing, or play music just to play music, or code a video game just because we love the doing of that thing, and not because we must, there is the possibility of flow and it’s in flow that our best work is done.
What does that mean? It means you need to ask yourself whether you really love writing children’s books or just the idea of being a children’s book author. They’re different. Do you love writing songs or do you do it because you want to have written songs? There’s no reason it can’t be both, and for everything we do there are probably plenty of reasons we do them, including the more mundane need to put food on the table. But when you do it for its own sake, you open yourself to flow more reliably and I think it begs asking, for every one of us: why is it so damn hard to start or finish this thing, and is there a way I could make it easier?
That might mean digging a little and looking at some of your fears.
It might mean becoming more attuned to the voices you listen to so you can better respond to them.
It might mean taking some of the pressure off.
Frankly I think the need to post every damn thing we do to social media only inflames the instinct to compare ourselves with others and that’ll kill your joy every time.
And yes, it could be that you just don’t love the thing you do the way you once did and it’s probably worth exploring that and finding a way to bring the joy back. Maybe you’re bored and you need to challenge yourself or head in a new direction.
Maybe you need to learn some new skills so you can meet the need for greater challenge.
And it might all just be as simple as it often is for me, and that means putting my lazy ass in the chair, on a schedule that doesn’t overwhelm me, is made of clear and bite-sized pieces marked out with start-lines and due dates, and getting to work. Because I do love the work. More than ever I love it. But I’ll take all the help I can get to keep me doing it with focus, challenge and the freedom that comes from flow.
If these ideas resonate with you and you find yourself taking notes or nodding your head or wondering if I’ve been reading your mail, it’s because you’re not the only one that struggles with getting started or getting finished. I was thinking of you as I was writing my latest book, Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, because we’re not so different and if I can help you experience more starts, you’ll get to more finished work, and better finished work.
You can find Start Ugly at StartUglyBook.com along with The Problem with Muses which is basically the book version of 28 of the first episodes of A Beautiful Anarchy, made into a book so you could experience these ideas and stories without headphones or attached to a device. Both are available as PDF and Kindle editions, but there’s no substitute for holding them in your hands and you can do that by finding both Start Ugly and The Problem with Muses at Amazon, your favourite brick and mortar store (though you’ll probably have to order it) or through the links at StartUglyBook.com.
Thanks so much for joining me. If you’re only just discovering A Beautiful Anarchy I post new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but there’s no reason you should take a break on those 4th weeks so I‘d like to send you a monthly issue of On The Make which is basically an email version of A Beautiful Anarchy and you can get it by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and once a month I’ll draw the name of one reader to whom I’ll send a signed copy of one of my books. Thanks so much for being part of this. You’re one of the reasons I get out of bed in the morning and I don’t take it for grated. We’ll talk soon. Until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0