Better Late Than Never

2025-09-14

“When’s the deadline?”

It’s a sentence I’ve uttered many times. And it isn’t until recently that I learned the word has its roots in a literal deadly boundary.

During the American Civil War, a deadline referred to a boundary within prisoner-of-war camps. Cross the line and you risk being shot on sight.

No wonder hearing a task has a deadline makes many of us squeamish.

The deadliness of the word has since diluted. The word entered the printing world in the 20th century, when we started using the word to mean a limit on a press bed. Simply put, text beyond this ‘dead line’ would not print.

And slowly, newspapers began using deadline to mean the latest time a story could be sent to the press for printing.

We’ve gone from risking your life to bruising your reputation or missing out on an opportunity.

Our approaches to deadlines, or indeed their effectiveness, speak to the evolving nature of the word.

To me, our feelings around deadlines specifically highlight how different our strategies can be depending on the task at hand.

Deadlines sometimes spur us into action, while other times make us anxious and fearful. Research reviews support this notion that deadlines can be messy.

On the one hand, they’ve been found to boost productivity. I think many of us remember pulling an all-nighter at university to get that paper written. However, this boost often comes at a cost to our accuracy.

Additionally, other studies suggest that deadlines can enhance our focus and speed. But before you set yourself ten deadlines to sprint through your to-do list, you should pause.

You see, for creative thinkers (and tasks), limited time for reflection and exploration can be a significant downside.

I’ve certainly felt this way. Writing with a deadline can seem stifling.

It’s like saying, “Be creative and original but, please, do it within the next 24 hours.” Go ahead and try it; it’s not easy.

Yet, I also agree that sometimes having a due date just makes you act with a bit more determination.

The less urgency I give to a task, especially when it’s not work-related, the more likely I am to procrastinate on it. You see, there is really no deadly line, right?

And so, in my quest to make more sense of my own approach to deadlines and to make sense of the complex human nature, I’ve become one of those people. You know, the ones who break tasks into tiny steps and time-block even the smallest of tasks.

However, it actually really works and adds focus and clarity to my days.

The truth is, I don’t really expect to appease that green owl at a set time most of the time, or meditate when the clock strikes 8pm.

It’s more about just having a vision and a framework for my days.

And with those creative tasks like writing?

Well, I don’t expect an excellent idea to come to me at 9am even if my schedule says so.

My framework uses deadlines as a roadmap to the end goal, while allowing me to break free and do those second-round edits.

So, while I often have deadlines to ‘have an idea’, to run with it for a while, and to edit this idea into a presentable form, I also leave room to completely rethink it all, if necessary.

You could say I'm creating a deadline within a deadline.

I let myself be creative while still moving forward. I don’t feel the anxiety of trying to wait for that ‘perfect’ idea to strike because I make myself work with whatever comes around the first time — at least for a bit.

If a better idea comes along, I’ll (probably) have time to play around with it as well. If I feel like editing, I (mostly) do so even if I technically should be doing the laundry.

These days, with my framework, I allow creativity to emerge while staying focused on what needs doing.

And I avoid having that awful sense of dread I used to get when the question of deadlines came around.