The Perpetual Deadline

I saw a video the other day that made me laugh but also made me think. The video was of a computer screen: in the middle of the screen was a file downloading with a “percentage complete” bar while on the bottom right of the screen was the time. The time showed in hours, minutes, and even seconds. As the “percentage complete” bar was rising, the time at the bottom right was ticking away. Literally at 11:59pm and 58 seconds, the file finished downloading and was turned in.

This is a situation very near and dear to my heart! I did a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and certainly had my fair share of these moments. I remember beating the midnight deadline by a minute, and I even remember being late by a minute. These deadlines for school or work seem so absolute; when the teacher or boss says the project is due you know that you need to have it done by then.

Contrast that feeling with trying to keep a self-made deadline. I know that with this blog I try and maintain a deadline for each post. Sometimes I keep it, sometimes I don’t. I will say one thing for sure: I do not find myself at midnight uploading the post with seconds to spare when it’s my own deadline. It’s so easy to let deadlines slip when they are self-imposed, but so easy to adhere to deadlines set by others.

I am working on a research project in school with an ophthalmologist and two MRI scientists. One of the MRI scientists suggested that we meet every week to talk about the project. At first, I thought that might be excessive. We all know that many meetings can be useless or could have just been an email. But I noticed something about myself as we have had these weekly meetings: I always try and work on some part of the project because I don’t want to come to the meeting with nothing to say. There is a certain accountability that I feel to the other people on the project when I must report on what I worked on that week. You could say that each weekly meeting is a deadline. When I know there will be other witnesses to my laziness other than myself if I don’t do something by the deadline, I usually make sure to work on it.

Herein lies another principle of motivation: being accountable to others. When we can bake accountability into our personal goals by involving others, we’ll be more motivated to carry out those goals.