Deadlines

I wrote the other day about the importance, to me, of patience. Today, I am writing about urgency. Well, not exactly urgency as a whole (as…

DeadlinesI wrote the other day about the importance, to me, of patience. Today, I am writing about urgency. Well, not exactly urgency as a whole (as…


I wrote the other day about the importance, to me, of patience. Today, I am writing about urgency. Well, not exactly urgency as a whole (as I have written about that before), but rather tools or mechanisms we use in our own lives to instill urgency with what we do.

These “tools,” or DEADLINES, are things we implement in our own routines to hold ourselves accountable, avoid procrastination, and get shit done.

It is funny though….how imposing internal deadlines can affect the way we behave.

Imagine you make a deadline that you have to say…throw out the trash by the end of the day.

If you do not do it, no one would ever know, besides you. The deadline forces you to be accountable, yet you are accountable to no one but yourself.

So we impose deadlines to hold ourselves responsible.

Society also places deadlines on things — like at school or at work.

So we race towards deadlines, with a bit of urgency, and try to get things done.

Alternatively, if deadlines are far away, we do not do things until they are absolutely do.

Why is this behavior so common? Are deadlines a good thing?

Should we always be forward looking, racing towards a goal? Why do we need something to race towards? Why do we need a deadline? Why can’t we just try our best in the present?

These are all questions interesting to me.

I am constantly reminded on the importance of incentives and incentive structures in society.

Incentives run the world.

Our doing, and not doing for that matter, is hinged on the psychological presence of push and pull influences. We are a product of incentives, yet we rarely think about how things like deadlines influence our own behavior.

Is it better or worse?


Originally published at gonen.blog.

Tagged in Productivity

By jordangonen on October 5, 2017.

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Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.