They sometimes feel like the core of our lives. They creep up on us or scream from afar. They leave a void between the present and the future date. In this post, I'll quickly run through why deadlines feel so prevalent today and some strategies I can share about how to deal with them.
Digitization, especially during the COVID-19 era, has transformed a part of our realities into 2-D schedules and digital planners. Our days are lined up in calendars where it is easier than ever before to book a meeting and fill up the screen with colorful squares that look like a variety of conversations, but blend into a dreadfully long sedentary experience. We saw this phenomenon become especially clear during the quarantine where we were stuck in our abodes and time began to take on a new meaning— more opportunity to get work done, but a constant uncertainty as to how it would be applied into the real world that seemed to have changed in an instant (For athletes: does it matter if I train anymore without competitions? For artists: what are some creative ways for me to showcase my work? For students: what is the most productive and meaningful work I can put in now, considering that the ways we submit, share, and study are no longer the same?)
Now that we're in a reopening phase, there's an awkward mix between the remnants of our pandemic habits, where we piled work on ourselves in order to trudge through the monotony and a slow return to normalcy. We're starting to reckon with the unique experience we underwent and readjust to some physical meetings/deadlines while keeping a portion of the digital ones. How can we find a balance between the two and continue meeting these deadlines that sometimes feel like they're zooming past us or will never come?
The first advice I would recommend is to never be on the ends of the spectrum. Don't procrastinate until the last minute, just as how you shouldn't rush to complete a project right from the get go in order to remove it from your list of activities. This latter point is one that I am still working to apply in my everyday life, it's an element of my personality I'm hoping to strengthen. It can be tempting to frontload all of your work in your schedule in order to avoid having to think about a responsibility until it is due, but this can sometimes encourage rapid work without much thought given to the process. The best way to learn something is to practice it every day, so if you find that you want to immerse yourself in a particular subject, it's probably better to spread it out until you reach the deadline. If, however, a project doesn't capture your interest or you don't feel attached to the work, then frontloading might not be a bad strategy (don't blame yourself— we can't love and spend hours with everything that we do!).
Thus, deadlines are a matter of balance and flexibility. You own your schedule, and you should choose which subjects to give more attention to all the while keeping in mind that it might be better to spread a certain task over a longer period of time until you reach the deadline. Never let one deadline slip from your grasp, or else the rest of them will come falling quickly after.
In terms of how to stay more organized, I would honestly say that nothing is better than an old-fashioned pen and paper list that you can cross off, add colors to, and control with ease. Electronic calendars do come with gimmicks like alarms, notifications, and easily accessible Zoom links, but it can be a hassle to cancel meetings, cross off items, and add small notes on the side, which is not the case with a paper. Attach it your computer or phone and cycle through papers often to make sure that they don't clutter with too much ink.
That's about all I can think of, but if you have any more tips about how to meet deadlines or some feedback on anything I offered, let me know and I'd be happy to include them in a future post!
3/27/21