Deadlines are despised at any workplace and can be easily characterized by overtime. But without deadlines human kind may not have perhaps achieved even half of the achievements. And it is not just you, almost everyone tends to procrastinate on anything and everything that does not have a deadline. Without deadlines most of tend to procrastinate perpetually while deadlines can even create miracles in record time.
Think of the test that you started preparing for but never eventually ended up taking. You might have made numerous promises to yourself but something always came up to shift the priority. Whereas, when the scientists had a deadline they reduced the turnaround time for a vaccine from a few decades to a few months. Although there are other lucky coincidences that contributed to faster vaccine development, deadline did play a significant role.
*Coincidentally, owing to the previous outbreak of SARS and MERS, which are both from the coronavirus family, scientists had spent the last decade researching on coronaviruses. Also the mRNA technology was under development for quite few years. You can use the analogy of the Chinese Bamboo that we will explore in another topic.
Usually formal deadlines carry either incentives or penalties, whereas voluntary deadlines do not share the same characteristic. These incentives and penalties are not necessarily monetary or quantifiable, but are qualitative or psychological. Such as the good done to mankind for each day saved in Vaccine development or the public embarrassment from failure to achieve promised GDP goals.
Hence self imposed deadlines are not as successful as imposed deadlines, unless you are self driven. Without an explicit understanding of the gains or loss, we are not usually motivated. And the gain or loss has to pinch hard enough to drive you. For instance, in consulting it is a social embarrassment to miss deadlines apart from the fact that it looks bad on the annual appraisal review.
Visualize the life that you are missing out on by procrastinating on all your promises
Just as work expands to fill up all the allocated time, including the possibility of endless expansion in absence of a deadline, our possessions keep increasing until it fills up all the available space. Perhaps our universe is yet to fill up the container! Have you moved in to a new apartment with just a suitcase but in a few months struggle to store your new clothes or find wall space for new art work? Or how your desk space at your new office gets filled up to the brim before you know the names of all your coworkers?
We weight our lives with our possessions. And most of us never realize that those possessions anchor our mobility physically and mentally. Even before minimalism became a rampant trend, which many fail to truly understand, a scene from Up in the Air (What’s in your backpack?) had inspired me way to explore and adapt minimalism. Hence, instead of writing any further I recommend that you click the link to watch the clip on YouTube.
In fact I can say that all I need to survive in any city is my brain and wallet. But this is a greater topic reserved for another blog. Back to the topic, cluttering our lives with inanimate objects that only add perceived superficial value also soaks up our time and energy. Although unnoticed in routine, the effects are quite noticeable over a longer horizon. True detachment may not be possible, however, one can start by simply distancing or disassociating themselves from their possessions. And finally, I will leave you with a quote of wisdom on worldly possessions.
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.
Mahatma Gandhi
Header Image by Piero Regnante on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 