Anyone who has worked in the sales business or existed, would have been hit in the head with the power of deadlines.
Or if you have read a blog post about productivity or goal setting, you would also have seen deadlines.
I’ve fallen in love with deadlines and that’s how I stay productive.
Without a deadline you are useless.
Let me give you an example. If I have a deadline, I produce twice as many blog posts.
At this moment, I have seven days left to go to Europe, which means that everything I am doing now has to be finished intelligently.
Last week I had a day when I had nothing booked, no meetings or phone calls. I put aside all day to write. Instead, what ended up happening was that I sat there and watched YouTube, I went on Facebook and read some articles.
In other words, I urinated all day on the wall and had nothing to show (good Timbo).
If you think about people who are on the verge of retirement, they suffer the same problem. They think that when they retire, they can finally travel or learn the piano or spend time with their children.
When these fun loving people finally reach retirement, they do not know half of what they said they would. They waited their entire life to do the things they love and they do not do it.
Saving the tasks to complete in the future is a complete waste of time. You need a deadline, otherwise you will never reach your goals / tasks / dreams.
I make up deadlines.
A little trick that I use is inventing deadlines.
Every Saturday is my writing day. It’s when I break my chops to deliver so many useful articles that I can, for free, with the most beautiful images I can find on the Internet, that will inspire you and make you act.
It’s a very hard work.
To achieve this huge weekly task that absorbs all my energy, I set a deadline at the end of the day.
I promise my girlfriend to have dinner at 6pm every Saturday, which means I have to finish at 5pm. The breach of this deadline implies a slow and tortuous death on the part of my girlfriend, who will never let me hear the end of being late for a romantic dinner.
This deadline not only allows me to stop in writing, but also gives me something to look forward to. It makes all the pain and sweat of writing worthwhile. This is how I celebrate it.
If you struggle with the deadlines, then try to invent your own.
Place an event on your calendar on purpose just after the goal you want to achieve. Make it something that you can not leave without feeling a lot of pain (or, in my case, “death for a girlfriend”).
The illusion of free time.
The best habit you can cultivate is to concentrate on “doing”, no matter what day, time or month of the year we are.
The moment you need to reserve time is the time when nothing will happen and you will find your long lost friend called delay.
“When you do not feel like it is the best time to work on your goals”
When we have free time, we believe that we have all day when we do not have it. Digital distractions can rob you a whole day faster than I can drink a Matcha Latte.
The next time you hear yourself saying “I’ll do it during this block of free time,” be wary of yourself. See through your own BS.
Everything is in the mind.
The battle to achieve your goals takes place mainly in the mind.
“Deadlines are just a way to sort of trick your brain into working with you rather than against you”
We’re wired to be fat, lazy bastards who should be scared of the big, bad world we live in.
Using reframe techniques like deadlines helps our mind think clearly and focus on what we want.
Our million-year-old brain is not there to make us win and so using deadlines is how we can program it to help us win big.
Deadlines are beautiful.
Until you’ve played around with deadlines, you will not see the beauty in them like I do.
The reason I love deadlines is because they are such a simple hack.
Simplicity is beauty in disguise.
“We’re often led to believe that whatever we’re dreaming of is incredibly difficult and our chance of success is almost zero. When you discover 2-3 little life hacks like deadlines, you start to see the impossible becoming possible “
I never thought I would have time, creativity, stories or knowledge to be a blogger. It always sounded very hard.
Then I used deadlines, habits and energy from a clean diet to blog my way to my goals. It is a beautiful thing when you can see how the world works through tools such as deadlines.
The deadlines work.
You can win in life.
All you need to do is choose a goal and have a good deadline at the end of it that gives you an advantage against yourself to overcome the delay.
Give an opportunity to the deadlines!