Deadlines, and Their Receding Silhouettes
by Evan Shultz
When someone gives you a deadline, the first thing you do is figure out how much time that gives you. Not so that you can budget your time, mind you. Next thing you do is estimate how long you will actually have to work on the task to complete it. Hindsight will invariably prove this estimate to be extremely liberal, usually measured in recipe-sized fractions of the actual time it took. You then subtract this estimate from the allotted time: This gives you the amount of time you can afford to procrastinate.
Which is, of course, the point of having a deadline. Otherwise you’d never know when one more day late would be one day too late, and then you might never procrastinate at all. Which can be dangerous. After all, if you don’t procrastinate at least once a day you quickly fall out of practice. Before you know it, you’re getting everything done well before it is due, and without those Damoclean swords hanging over your head your life will have no stress — you’ll be productive, but angst-free. And what do you call an overly productive artist with no angst? That’s right: a sellout.
I bring this up because I was supposed to blog no less frequently than once every three weeks. It has been six weeks and three days. First it was one week before I knew it, then I was in Scotland a week. After I got back it was three weeks before I knew it, then a month before I realized it was three weeks. It wasn’t until just recently, when I had someone asking me each day, “What do you still need to do?” that I started remembering all the things I needed to do. Like this. And by the time I realize the deadline is there, it’s behind me, and by the time I look behind me, it’s already a swiftly receding silhouette against the setting sun.
