Under Pressure
Tags: Writing, Procrastination, Time Management, Productivity, Work

The clock is ticking. With every second, the flames under me inch higher. And unlike most times where this is a plot device I’m using for a dramatic hook, the pressure is real.

You see — I set a self imposed deadline for myself. I have one hour to write this post, and when the timer beeps, it’s pencils down — whether I’m finished or not.

The last time I’ve written under this kind of pressure was when I took the GRE. Why am I essentially taking a standardized test out of my own volition?

This is what staring at a blank page with a timer counting down feels like. Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Writing takes time. My last post took about four hours to write, and three more hours the next day to edit. Between getting the wording “just right”, finding the best pictures to help tell my story, typing it all up and publishing, it’s easy to spend an entire weekend working on and thinking about a blog post. I told myself that I would write a blog post a week. Currently, I don’t have a large audience of followers expecting a weekly blog post, which means that the only accountability I have is to myself.

My post history tells the story. The gap between my first post and second was 11 days. The gap between my second and third was 10. And here we are on day 10 between my third and fourth. Maybe I’m only a few days behind, but I’m less motivated than ever to put out another blog post quickly. I need to make a change before I stop writing for good.

Eventually that gap gets big enough that I’ll stop posting (or fall down a deep crevasse). Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

The death of a good idea is perfection. It takes 10% of the time to complete 90% of a project, and 90% of the time to complete that last 10%. So what happens if I cut that last ten percent out altogether? That’s what my experiment of writing this post in an hour is testing.

43 minutes left!

I’m all too familiar with that last minute sprint before a big deadline. Somehow, the strong external deadline presents a sort of clarity that no other prodding or focus could. Suddenly, the task is stripped to the essentials and the most important challenges are clear.

The important things come into focus under pressure. Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

After the deadline passes, I can bathe in the glory of a task well done. Or more realistically, finally go to bed after a night bathed in the harsh light of my computer screen. And this relaxation lasts until the next deadline approaches. Rinse and repeat.

What my workload tends to look like

What if I could trick myself into being productive on demand? With a series of closely spaced, self imposed deadline, I could constantly work at peak productivity! I would always be riding that rush of adrenaline. This is similar to how agile “sprints” work.

Could I even my workload out with self-imposed deadlines?

But although this concept might work great in an office setting, it’s harder to apply to my life on a whole.

Why? Because I’m human.

I miss one deadline. Which causes me to miss another. The slippery slide keeps going until the self imposed deadlines become meaningless. I finally panic at the “true” external deadline. Trying to run at peak performance constantly is an exercise doomed to fail, because without any buffer to make mistakes I slide into a cascade of failure.

This is what reality looks like if I try setting self-imposed deadlines for everything

Yet, there is real merit to self-imposed deadlines when used judiciously. Here we are, at the end of this blog post (seriously — I have 43 seconds left!). While this post may suffer from grammatical errors and a little more rambling than a more polished version, this post simply wouldn’t have existed without the deadline. And a hundred posts from now, I’ll have worked the bugs out and one hour will feel like a natural window to write a blog post.

Time to find something do with all this free time.