Years ago, I participated in a graduate level course on sociology. There were only seven of us in the class. We met in a dusty, old room of the health sciences building on Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. Class sessions were roundtable discussions of the material we’d studied the previous week and an opportunity for the professor to ask us philosophical questions.
We read several books during the semester, all of them dealing with both chronic and acute social disorders. The professor indicated in the syllabus that we could write a two-page paper every week or any other combination of paper lengths as long as we wrote a total of 30 pages’ worth of well-researched papers by semester’s end.
All seven of us wrote a 30-page paper at the end of the semester.
As you can imagine, writing a 30-page paper during the last two weeks of a semester with other finals looming added a lot of unnecessary stress especially considering the avenue that had been afforded all of us.
I ended up getting a C in the class. I suppose the professor didn’t approve of my 25-page paper extended to 30 with the use of some minor spacing and margin adjustments and the addition of considerable fluff.
In reality, I think we, the students, were a case study in procrastination for the professor who was visiting from another university.
When I had 15 weeks ahead of me, it was easy to put off writing the paper. I reasoned that a 4-page paper would be simple enough every other week. Then it was an 8-page paper. Then the slow, steady demands of other professors continued to nudge that paper to the bottom of my to do list until it was too late to do anything other than write a 30-page paper.
I wish I could say that the whole experience was a pivotal moment in my life; that I conquered procrastination and became the poster child for getting stuff done.
I’m not, but like many people, I am driven by deadlines. For me, any project without a deadline is something I intuitively know can be put off over and over again. I reason that I can wait until a more opportune time to get started.
However, when deadlines loom, I perform quite well, even when the deadlines are imposed late in the game.
In my day job I had the opportunity to help a client write an extensive grant application. We had just over a week to put it all together with a deadline that could not be missed.
The end result was the client was awarded millions of dollars in grant money.
Rare are the times when most of us can focus most of our efforts on just one thing. Pressure to help other employees, pressure to show up for family, pressure to care for ourselves, and other social pressures are the norm.
While the pressure of a looming deadline can spur us into action, it’s often not the deadline itself but the mental shift it prompts that drives productivity. The mental model of “think-about-tomorrow” is not a new idea. Projecting just one day into the future can be useful as a tool for harnessing the urgency we feel before a deadline.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law, first described in 1908, is a psychological principle that describes the relationship between arousal and performance, but only up to a point. If the pressure becomes too high, performance decreases. Too low, and the pressure isn’t enough to create motivation.
We often overestimate how much we can get done in a day (or year) and underestimate what we can get done in five years. But, by considering tomorrow today, we can create a sense of urgency without overdoing the pressure. It’s about creating just enough pressure to get things done without creating overwhelm.
William James once said, “We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead. . .By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”
The “think-about-tomorrow” model encourages us to project ourselves just far enough into the future to help us visualize what we can accomplish and the satisfaction that comes with it. This small shift in perspective helps us prioritize what’s important, potentially reduce unwanted stress, and enhance our overall productivity.
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