Deadlines aren't always your friend

Or, how you can't make soufflé out of trail mix

Applying a deadline to creative work is like trying to make a soufflé out of trail mix.

I said this to a writer friend the other day, and the image has stuck with me as surprisingly apt— considering I tossed it off in the middle of an email. Deadlines and novel drafts come from different worlds. A deadline is specific, measured, measurable. A novel is abstract, invented, ethereal. How could we even think of applying the former to the work of creating the latter?

Photo by Lucas Oliveira on Unsplash

Of course, we need deadlines to give shape to our work. We need a framework through which to be held (and hold ourselves) accountable. Deadlines, plain and simple, enable people and organizations to be professional. I will forever remember the professor of a Victorian literature class I took in grad school (a woman who was then a towering figure in her field) announcing the deadline for her first assigned paper, and stressing the importance of our actually meeting it. No one would give us extensions in the professional world, she said. No one was going to allow us to turn in book chapters or scholarly articles late. So she said, and so we believed, under threat of failure. (She meant business, even if the academic profession was looser in their approach to schedules than she described.) Keeping this professor in mind, I have always taken very seriously the deadlines imposed on me by others.

But I’m learning that the deadlines I impose on myself aren’t always particularly helpful. In fact, they can be counterproductive often enough that I think it’s worth redefining them altogether.

We’re now five days away from the start of the Head of Charles Regatta (HOCR), when I’ll be competing for the umpteenth time in my single scull. This is an endeavor of stopwatches, calendars, paces, and stroke rates. Everything is measurable. No matter the serpentine Charles River and the potential for some less-than-efficient steering through its seven bridges, this race—and the months-long training that precedes it—is entirely quantifiable.

During this rowing race, I’m likely to count strokes in my head, ten at a time (don’t ask why, I don’t know, but it helps me). I know that, from the upstream corner of the Winsor dock, it takes 100-110 strokes to reach the finish line. If I keep track of my strokes, it will be impossible for me to sprint too soon. Before I even reach race day, I’ve had a training calendar I’ve been following. I’ve had workout plans for specific days. The only way for me to be counter-productive about all this chronological measurement will be if I consciously ignore it.

three of the seven bridges visible here in this photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

With creative work, I could set a deadline and assume that the virtuous path is to stick to it, and to stick to any detailed plan I’ve made to get there. But there’s no quantifiable measurement in creative work. There’s no stopwatch, or chronometer, or ergometer. Sure, we can tick off days, and we can measure (and hold ourselves accountable by) hours at the desk, or minutes on the (writing) job. But to expect a specific outcome—a specific qualitative outcome—from this kind of approach is not really that wise.

This week as I taper for the HOCR, I’m also 21 chapters in on the revision/rewrite of a 32-chapter novel. In the gorgeous Rhodia goal book that a friend gave me, I’ve loosely named early December as the time when I’ll be finished. That’s less than two months from now, after about a year of work. The end is so close. I can feel myself starting to anticipate the last phase of revision.

This is dangerous.

I can work really hard to meet that deadline. But what happens if the last eleven chapters need more work than I expected? (They do.) What happens if I discover something new I want to weave into the manuscript? How do I meet the deadline then? By rushing. The regatta equivalent of rushing to the end would be to start my sprint too early—and then stagger across the finish line with some pretty poor quality exhausted rowing. If I try to rush in order to meet a deadline that I imposed on my creative work from outside, the result will be a mess. Honestly, I’m sure of it.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

There is a way in which meeting the deadline no matter what can work—if you find more hours in those remaining days, thus stuffing, say, twenty days into the time it takes ten days to elapse. But how has that gone for you, those of you who’ve done that? Do you end up with really good quality work? OK, sometimes, yes. But much of the time, what comes out is a rush job, a tired job, a less-than-inspired job.

We ascribe too much virtue to the deadlines we apply to our creative work. (I keep repeating this formulation, because I’m not talking about other kinds of deadlines, applied to other kinds of work. And I don’t mean deadlines imposed by other people who need things from us. Honor those!) Is the goal to write a good book that we can be proud of, or to meet some date on the calendar? Once the book is finished, who is going to care that it was finished on such and such a date? No one. What people will care about is whether or not it offered a great reading experience. What you will care about is whether you wrote your best version of that book.

I spend a lot of time on this newsletter writing about the ways in which sports and creative work can be the same. Now I’m asking you to see how profoundly different they are—and to take from that difference a measure of encouragement. Use time and dates to the extent that you can keep yourself doing the work, just plain old making progress. Don’t use time and dates to force you to rush that work. Allow yourself to embrace the soufflé nature of writing a novel. Save the trail mix for later.