Dead Without Deadlines

One of Murphy's laws states that work expands to the time allotted to it. But when you're just given the time, and it's you who has to first think of some work to do, and do it too - things just get worse.

One feeling that is ubiquitously experienced is that deadlines enhance productivity. Of course, it comes with a bit of stress but the positive effects outnumber the rest. Your brain is put to a good, continuous productive use; you are aware of a goal, you plan spontaneously, execute with tremendous diligence; you are racing against time but somehow you feel timeless - its that goal you want to achieve; even a minute's break there refreshes more than a whole day spent lazily at home. And the fulfillment that follows - ah! happiness, the wholeness, the sense of well-being, the sense of accomplishing something - is amazing. You end up doing things which you postponed for the leisurely days, on the busiest of your days. That's how it is - when your brain has gathered a momentum, its best to say - make hay while the sun shines.

On the contrary, when there's no deadline kicking your backside, you master the art of procrastinating wonderfully. You come up with innovative unprecedented reasons to convince yourself of why a particular task can be done sometime later, only to be welcoming boredom to enslave you. And that doesn't come alone - time seems to have lost all its pace, yet at the end of the day you feel a whole day sped by without making much of a difference. You feel lack of control (over what! you don't know), you grudge, you loathe things that doesn't even remotely have anything to do with you. Self-confidence goes for a toss, you doubt whether you have done anything useful in your life.


So what happens when deadline-dependent-lesser-mortals like us are put in a situation where enormous amount of self-motivation is required to keep going? We know that by the time when we actually see the deadline at the far-end of our myopic vision, it would be a bit too late to react; we know self-imposed deadlines don't work; and we know the work we're supposed to do will never be more tempting than movies or cricket. So where do we go from here? Is there is a fault with the system that created this situation, or with us?