How do deadlines motivate?

When we approach a new firm for work purposes (to be recruited), we often face a particular question from the interviewer — “How do you manage your deadlines?”.

Well, first of all, what are deadlines? They are craftily made time restrictions which when crossed without any result, gets us bippity-boppity-boop’d out to the team leader’s office. These let us take control of our work, and let us decide how to complete it within the time frame.

Some creative questions of the same background, that we might hear in our school, college, and work-life are — ‘How do you prioritize tasks?’ and ‘Why is it important to manage your time well?’. All of these just carves the same answer from all — ‘I map out my tasks, according to time and cruciality, and them complete them.’

When these deadlines are applied in the real workplace, we get sweaty and often find ourselves flabbergasted at the end of the line. Procrastinators deal with this problem easily, because they map out the last-minute additions while planning, so even if they start working at the brink of sunset, they’d be able to perfect the work before dawn. So, deadlines motivate them.

There are some particular aspects as to how the last line of the last paragraph works. Deadlines set intrinsically, are always worthy of being followed. Set intrinsically, they tend to be not followed and forgotten. A person time and again inclines towards completing the work in an hour from submission because psychologically, they determine that no other work can be done now, they’d have to complete their work now.

Motivation through deadlines can be explained with Val Kilmer’s quote — “Without deadlines and restrictions, I just tend to become preoccupied with other things.”