
Forget All Your Deadlines, There’s Only One Deadline In Life
And it’s a lot more urgent than everything else too.
This post was inspired by Scott Riddle’s heartfelt story. More power to you.
You’ve probably been in a situation like this once or twice. You just arrived at your office and the first thing you hear is your boss yelling at you to finish your goddamn report by 9:15 in the morning. Your office hours is 9 to 5.
Deadlines.
Bills to pay at the end of the month. Getting married because you’re almost thirty. Enrollment period of your son going to middle school. Fucking taxes.
Deadlines. There’s all sorts of stuff that screams urgency right inside your earlobes.
I fucking hate them.
Deadlines make me worry. Deadlines make me scramble. Deadlines are somehow, always urgent. I don’t understand why everything’s so fucking urgent, but yeah, deadlines prompts urgency, for better or for worse. A lot more time for worse I’d say. That’s why I think deadlines are unnecessary.
But I realized, deadlines aren’t so bad at all.
Actually, I think I love deadlines now.
Deadlines give me purpose. Deadlines inspires action in me. Deadlines light my ass on fire. Deadlines make me efficient. Deadlines effectively pull me inch by inch closer to whatever it is I need to do. For lazy people like me, deadlines, I think, are necessary.
I thought about it and realized, I’m just looking forward to the wrong kind of deadlines. I’m doing things that pretend to be urgent but aren’t. I’m doing things that pretend to be important but aren’t.
Instead, I should be doing the things I really want to do like they are the most urgent agendas in the world. And they are.
Because once the deadline has passed, you can never ask for an extension because it’s over.
There’s no penalty bill because it’s already been paid.
And there’s no “I’ll do it tomorrow or next week or next year” because, well, you know.
The deadline, quite literally. You’ll never know when it’s coming.

I’m Gen and I write about life, minimalism, and video games with my own flavor of humor and snark. If you like my stuff, you can follow me here @thenthgen
