I love deadlines. I love the way they start off distant and creep up. I love their definitive finality. I love the impending sense of completion that deadlines bring. I love the way that, without deadlines, humanity would slip back into a morass of sloth.
I conquer deadlines. I have a reputation for meeting every deadline. Every deadline is a challenge, but a challenge I can meet. When there's a deadline coming up, I reorganise my life to make sure I hit it. If I prioritise properly, every deadline can be met. I know I have the self-discipline and determination to succeed. I always meet my deadlines, always.
My blog is little more than a series of daily deadlines, to which I apply myself with care and diligence. There is always something new for you to read each day because every new day is a new deadline. There has to be a post tomorrow, so I always force myself to knuckle down and write it. I'm dedicated like that.
I need deadlines. I need a precise time by which something must be done. I can't be doing with woolly deadlines, otherwise things don't get done. I have to know what needs doing first, what needs doing next, and what I can leave until later. I need to set myself a timed target, else I let things slip. I need priorities. Without a deadline, I procrastinate.
My blog would never get written without deadlines. Tomorrow's deadline is the only thing that forces me to knuckle down and be creative. I don't have a single post waiting on standby in case I run out of inspiration. I can't write a stack of posts for future consumption and file them away in readiness. The post you read tomorrow was invariably written less than 24 hours before. I have to write fresh, with the scream of a deadline approaching fast, or I don't write at all.
I only narrowly hit deadlines. I always faff about and waste time until the deadline is imminent, and only then do I force myself to get down to work. If I have a deadline at the end of March, I'll finish on March 31st. If the deadline's at midnight, I'll finish at five to. All my projects expand to fill the time available, however much time that might be. Give me two months and I'll take two months, give me two hours and I'll take two hours.
I can only work to genuine deadlines. If a deadline isn't genuine, my subconscious refuses to recognise it. It's no good pretending that something needs to be finished by Tuesday if it isn't really needed until Friday. I'll let that fake Tuesday deadline pass by and finally pull my finger out on Friday afternoon, even though I could have got the whole thing sorted much earlier. I know a genuine deadline when I see it.
I hate deadlines. They hang around like a bad smell, poisoning my life. They loom on the horizon, reminding me that I need to get something finished, and that I can't rest until I do. Deadlines fill my time and stop me from doing other things. I know I should be working towards the deadline, I know I could be working towards the deadline, but I also know that I don't need to be working towards the deadline. Not yet anyway. Right now I can find a million and one displacement activities to do instead, so I always delay the important stuff until later. It's never the right thing to do, but that's the way I work.
I hate the way I approach deadlines. I should finish work early and then go off and enjoy myself, but instead I do things in reverse. I sit around tinkering and toying, making a half-hearted attempt to get nowhere, whilst distracting myself with trifles and fripperies. I waste umpteen days a year not quite getting round to doing things. My life is blighted by inefficient and untimely practices. I cannot complete work in advance, I can only complete work for deadlines. But I always, absolutely always, manage to meet them.
I have a deadline to meet today. But I wrote this instead.
