On Deadline

I’ve noticed that I’ve been talking and reading a lot about deadlines lately; living with them, the intricacies and pitfalls of navigating them, of the way they string together to create, in the absence of punchclocks and HR departments, the only real map of where you’ve been (or where you’re going) in the open sea of freelance life.

Living this life as long as I have, I’ve gotten only marginally better at the elusive art of time management, and I still find myself often doing the goof-off/deadline crunch two-step.

A note to Art Directors and Editors: by goof-off I actually mean working hard consistently and committedly. Any lateness is due entirely to all the love and care I am lavishing on your project.

In a recent Permanent Damage column, Steven Grant writes of his own struggles with the apparently malleable nature of deadline time, and proposed the following laws:

1) "The amount of time required to complete a project will automatically grow to exceed the amount of time available."

2) "Scheduling creates a gravitational field that attracts unrelated events toward the scheduled block of time."

He actually, included a third law (sort of) but it completely went over my head, and so I’ll run with his ball and interpose a third law of my own, which is not really my own since it was originally observed by my arch-enemy, back before he was my arch-enemy.

3) “The last 10% of any project takes as much time/energy as the first 90%”

Actually, his observation simply referred to time. I’ve found though that in most Work-for-hire circumstances it’s actually energy. See, the last 10% of any Work-for-hire project invariably involves manic cramming, thus the time it takes is actually comparatively short, the energy required, however, is always monumental. When it comes to personal work of any kind though, I’ve found that both the time and energy required to break through that last 10% easily equals the first 90%, and often exceeds it.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a quote from the late, great Douglas Adams, a spectacular blower of deadlines:

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Track of the Day: Hands around my Throat – Death in Vegas