The Writing Deadline Lie.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a deadline-driven procrastinator. From grad school papers to ghostwriting contracts, deadlines have been how I motivate myself to finish whatever I’m working on.

If you’re anything like me, you know the feeling of the slowly curling fingers of stress and anxiety, until you’ve backed yourself into a corner of time and those fingers grasp you in a death grip. In a frenzied rush, the work somehow gets done, you collapse in a puddle of exhaustion, and eventually, you move on to procrastinating before the next big deadline.

My deadline motivations have been so honed over the years that I can calculate the day and hour that I have to shift into go mode without even thinking about it. I rarely miss external deadlines. Whether it’s writing or other tasks, things always seem to get done when they need to get done.

Over the years, I’ve accepted that this was how I got things done: procrastination to think about the project, and then a rush of action, pushed forward by the fear of missing a deadline or letting someone down. I’ve tried planning ahead and trying to avoid the stress, anxiety, and chaos that this created, but it never really worked and soon I’d be back, burning the midnight oil as I pushed toward another deadline.

My writing and work always seemed to weather the chaos without effect and in some cases, the wait before starting seemed to benefit what I’d produced. Writing courses reinforced my belief that this was just the way I was wired and to use that frenzied chaos to get to the end of whatever I was working on.

I just work better under pressure.

The Writing Deadline Lie

What were the effects of my deadline driven rush behaviors?

Even though I’d flirted with the answers to that over the years (and discarded them because, after all, this was just the way I was wired), I hadn’t really considered the effects of being so deadline-driven. Oh, sure, the adrenaline that wound its way through my body during the frenzied rush was a high. Every time I managed to hit the deadline, I’d feel good, a sense of accomplishment, that I’d managed to pull it off.

What I didn’t understand was the toll it took underneath all that adrenaline. Events and plans that were canceled because I had to work. Weekends that were spent in front of my computer instead of seeing friends or relaxing. The periods after big deadlines where I would wind up sick with a cold or the flu. The nights that I didn’t sleep well worried about whether I’d be able to finish on time. The constant feelings of stress, anxiety, worry, and guilt that swam around during the frenzied rushes, all of which affected not only my mental health, but my physical health as well. The exhaustion that would level me as soon as the submit button was hit.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking, “Oh, I’m glad I don’t do this. I plan, work ahead, and make sure that I don’t get caught in this trap.” And maybe you give yourself a little pat on the back for your avoidance of the deadline rush.

So, I’ll ask you: why do you plan, work ahead, and make sure you don’t get caught in the trap? Is it fear of missing the deadline? Worry about letting others down? The need to be in control?

Your patterns may look different, but your emotions are the same. We’re just dealing with them on a different timeline and like the emotions impact my writing practice, they also impact yours.

The Bottom Line of Writing Deadlines

Writing deadlines, whether external or self-imposed, are a part of the writing journey. While I do think that procrastination can be beneficial some of the time, using it to fuel the adrenaline rush of that deadline frenzy doesn’t really do us any favors in the end. And, I do think that planning ahead and writing early can be useful sometimes too. But, neither one of the normal writing patterns is perfect, because both of them are often mired in motivation that relies on negative emotions.

Those negative emotions (stress, frustration, worry, anxiety, etc.) sap energy. The problem is that it doesn’t stop with just energy. It impacts your productivity, creativity, and decision-making. It also tends to seep out of your writing life and into other aspects of your life, from relationships to what you have the capacity to do to how you feel about you. The emotions of deadline pressure (or planning control) aren’t benign. They have costs. Those emotions and the behaviors that come with them affect our health (including sleep!), our wellbeing, our mental health, and our potential with our writing.

What would your writing life feel like if you took away the stress, worry, anxiety, and exhaustion?

Better Motivation for Writing Deadlines

If you, like me, are deadline-driven, rushing to finishing and exhausting yourself in the process, here are a few tips for changing the playing field.

• Get clear on what your motivation pattern costs you. It’s easy to see the benefits of the deadline rush: you finish. Because that’s the focus, it can be easy to miss the negative effects underneath. Spend some time thinking about the negative effects of your motivation behavior—on your writing, on your mental and psychical heath, and on your non-writing life.

• Spot and question the negative emotions. Learning to spot the negative emotions behind unproductive procrastination can help you move forward sooner than you might have otherwise. It also helps you be more aware of stress, anxiety, doubt, and other negative emotions if you find yourself in the deadline rush because that pattern is going to take time to change.

• Shift the negative to positive. Once you become aware of the negative emotion circling around, you’ll be able to spot them earlier and be able to shift yourself away from the negative emotions to the direction of peak performance, whether you are two months from the deadline or two weeks. Even in the deadline rush, this will make it easier and take less of a toll on you and your writing. Short mindfulness techniques can work great to help you do this. My favorite is to use short (2 minute) breaks to focus on what I hear around me to help me be present in the moment.

• Focus on pulling vs. pushing. When you are having to push yourself toward writing deadlines, the result is almost always going to be full of negative and unproductive emotions. Instead, look for motivations and emotions that pull you toward writing deadlines. Curiosity, creativity, passion, purpose, and so on can all help pull you toward the finish line. That pull means that you expend less energy to finish, are better able to reach for better performance writing-wise, and reduces the chances of writing burnout.

The best part is that these simple steps allow you to take greater control over the emotions of writing and your deadlines without making a big fuss about it. That makes changing the deadline-driven and the write-early-control pattern a lot less overwhelming and a lot easier to do because you won’t have to fight your brain trying to cling to the pattern. Instead, you’ll be creating new pathways and patterns that help your brain gravitate toward a writing life of greater ease and flow.

You don’t need to make big swings in behavior here to make a difference. Deadline driven writers may never become done-way-ahead writers and vice versa. Small changes, even a few hours or days, can help produce less stress, worry, anxiety, and frustration and help keep us in a better, more creative, and more productive place that ultimately, improves our writing and writing life.