Don't wait to be given a deadline

I recently committed to two new stressful things.

Namely, sending my newsletter The Necronoppicon out fortnightly, and uploading a new video to my YouTube channel Jason Arnopp’s Terrifying House Of Obsession every single Sunday. This has imposed a rigid new structure to my working weeks. Even though this structure has applied more pressure to me, I wouldn't have it any other way, because hard deadlines are our friends. Stick with me and I’ll tell you how you can use deadlines to get more creativity done, no matter what level you’re currently at.

Here’s the thing: without a deadline for a project, how are you supposed to prioritise? How can you possibly decide what to do next if you don’t know when everything needs to be done? I’ve been a freelance writer for three decades now, in the fields of fiction and journalism (although many would call those two indistinguishable) and the first thing I ask when I’m commissioned to do something is when it needs to be done by.

Okay, sure… if a commissioning editor or a producer says, “Are you free next Friday?” I will ask what the job is first. Then I might ask about the money. But the first thing I’ll ask that’s actually relevant to actually getting the job done is the deadline.

I find it easy to step into line with a weekly pulse, because rock journalism instilled that rhythm in me. Exactly two decades ago, I was the news editor on Kerrang!, the world’s finest – and admittedly only – weekly rock magazine.

For a decade before that, I had been a freelancer for the magazine, headbanging to its weekly beat and delivering articles by mid-week because the magazine was put to bed every Friday, to come out the following Tuesday.

Being news editor on Kerrang! was a blast, but if I’d done it for much longer than 18 months I would have burned myself out. It was an amazing process, coming into the London office every Monday and seeing which blank pages I had to play with, then proceeding to fill them with news over the next few days, delivering one set of pages at a time. I would be lying to you if I said that the looming Friday deadline wasn’t terrifying, but that got-to-get-it-done-no-matter-what terror also directly translated into high-adrenaline excitement.

One Thursday night, I slept in the office, to make sure that the band Korn’s management had emailed over suitably high-resolution images of the band’s new US live show, because my main news story relied on that content. (Back then, in ye olde days, some of us didn’t have the proper internet at home!) Soon as the pictures showed up at 3am, I figured it was barely worth going home to Camden Town and coming back, so I dozed on a sofa just outside the office, able to sleep all the more soundly for the knowledge that I would reach my deadline that week.

I always met the deadline, because I had to. The unthinkable alternative would have been Kerrang! magazine hitting newsagents’ shelves with blank spaces where the news should be. And hard deadlines are our friends, because they create a sense of do-or-die urgency. When you’re zooming towards a hard deadline, it may as well be a brick wall. Failure is not an option.

Here is something I’d really like you to consider if you haven’t already: why should we wait for other people to give us a deadline? We are equally able to set deadlines for ourselves and our own pro-active, self-starting work.

Why do we have a tendency to treat deadlines from other people as somehow more serious than the ones we apply to ourselves?

So no matter what you’re doing, no matter what you’re creating, don’t wait for permission. Do not allow projects to wander on and on forever. Give yourself a deadline and make it concrete-hard. Regardless of whether you’re embarking on your first ever piece of fiction, or you’ve formed anything from a band to a start-up company, act as if your failure to finish your project by a week on Tuesday will result in absolute disaster. The equivalent of Kerrang! hitting the shelves blank.

When you make hard deadlines your friend, you make failure unthinkable, which can surely only lead to success.

Do you agree? Are deadlines our friends or the work of Satan? Tell me in comments below.

Subscribers to my fortnightly mailing list The Necronoppicon received this article direct to their inbox one week ago. Join them here.

P.S. I've just launched a new free service that will help keep creatives motivated and work towards their goals. Check out Jason Arnopp's Sunday Confession Booth...

Mentioned in this article: my newsletter The Necronoppicon and my YouTube channel Jason Arnopp's Terrifying House Of Obsession.