What the deadline decides

A deadline is supposed to decide one thing, which is when the work gets handed over. Leave the work until the deadline is the only thing making you do it, and the deadline ends up deciding a good deal more. None of these decisions gets announced. They're made by default, by the plain fact that there are nine hours left.

It decides the quality. Your first draft becomes your final draft, with a read-through if you're lucky. Much of what makes work good happens on the second pass, when you can see what you've said and fix it. People who start late are handing in first drafts for a living. They're often good first drafts, which is how the habit survives.

It decides the scope. The section you meant to research, the second example and the appendix with the costs all get cut at one in the morning. The person cutting them is tired, and the only test applied is what can be left out without anyone noticing.

It decides what you learn. Work that's finished with days to spare can be shown to someone. A colleague reads it and tells you the third section lost her. You can't get that on a Thursday night. Over years it adds up to a great deal of feedback you never received, and I suspect that's one reason the dread never shrinks.

It decides who else pays. There's the colleague who needed your part by Wednesday to do theirs. There's the person who proofreads at midnight as a favour. There's whoever lives with you, who gets a short-tempered version of you for three days and a wrecked one on Friday evening.

It decides how the waiting feels. This is the one I'd most like you to notice, because you pay it on the days when you did no work and thought you were at least getting a rest. E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister ran a series of studies on unfinished goals. People who had been reminded of something important they hadn't done had more intrusive thoughts while reading something unrelated. They also did worse on an unrelated word puzzle. The unfinished thing went on using up attention. You'll know this from the inside. It's the proposal turning up in the middle of a film, or at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon for no reason. The days you took off from the proposal weren't off. The same studies found a way to quiet those thoughts, and I'll come to it in chapter 12.

It may decide something about your health, though here I'll be careful. A 2023 study followed 3,525 university students in Sweden. Those who procrastinated more had somewhat higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress symptoms nine months later, along with poorer sleep. That held after the researchers allowed for a long list of other factors. The differences were small, and a study of this kind can't prove cause. Tice and Baumeister's students, as we saw, ended their term sicker. I'll mention health this once and leave it there.

And for some work, the deadline decides never. If the only thing that gets you to do important work is a date with consequences attached, then important work with no date doesn't get done. Think of the portfolio you'd need to change jobs, the application for a course that takes new people every term, or the plan for the business. Nobody is going to ring you about these. They often matter more than anything in your inbox, and the system you're running has no way of ever reaching them. Chapter 11 is about that.

You might answer that the work gets done and people are happy with it. Both are probably true. I'm not claiming your work is poor. I'm saying you have never chosen its quality, its scope, its cost to other people or its cost to your weekends. The calendar chose. If a colleague made those decisions on your behalf without asking, you'd object, and you'd be right to.

So the aim here is narrower than turning you into someone who starts early out of virtue. It's to put those decisions back in your hands. You may still decide to do a quick version of something, and chapter 9 is in favour of that. The difference is that you'll have decided.