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The Ultimate Deadline
Why awareness of death’s inevitability may be a good thing.
I’ve been having dreams for several weeks about working for a newspaper, which strikes me as odd since the last time I did that in real life was in 1976. I’m not sure why these dreams are occurring now, but I have my suspicions. The big clue is that in each dream, I’m feeling the pressure of an impending deadline.
I was a newspaperman for three years and working diligently to become one for the preceding ten. The prime directive of the newspaper business then, and probably still, was Make Your Deadline. Deadlines were sacrosanct, for good reason: Getting a newspaper onto the street was a long and complicated process, a series of steps from writing to editing to page design, to typesetting and printing and delivery. Minutes mattered. Missing a deadline on the front end — the responsibility of the lowly reporter — had unpleasant impacts on every other step in the chain. Miss the deadline and your story missed that day’s edition — and you could count on receiving a fierce tongue-lashing guaranteed to augment your vocabulary.
Being conscientious and eager to please, I learned to be deadline-driven. The looming deadline was a powerful incentive to focus all my concentration and write with all deliberate speed. It always worked. Sometimes it worked only too well…
