I used to keep a Post-it note hanging over my workspace with the name Esther Murphy written on it in black Sharpie. I jotted down this warning-to-self sometime around 2012, when I was inhaling Lisa Cohen’s exuberant triple biography, “All We Know,” about three queer women of ample means who cavorted through the literary and fashion circles of Paris, London, and New York in the early twentieth century. Murphy, the daughter of a leather-goods mogul (and the younger sister of Gerald Murphy, whose house in the South of France was immortalized in “Tender Is the Night”), was a brilliant talker. She held parlor rooms rapt with rollicking historical anecdotes and swaggering political soliloquies; her mind, a magpie’s nest of knowledge, connected people to ideas and ideas to sweeping philosophies. “If you asked her a question,” Cohen writes, “she would lean back, take several staccato puffs on her cigarette, say: ‘All we know is’—and then launch into a long disquisition on the subject.” But what Murphy could not do, despite her fierce intelligence and improvisatory éclat, was meet a deadline.
Murphy was “writing” a biography of Françoise d’Aubigné, a French noblewoman, religious fanatic, and proto-feminist who secretly married Louis XIV but never became the official queen of France. For three decades, Murphy hemmed and hawed, insisted that the book was “about a third done,” and failed to commit her grand theories to paper. Friends helped her make publishing connections, but Murphy blew past her delivery dates like a cyclone. Then, one day in 1962, at the age of sixty-five, while getting ready for a walk across the Seine, Murphy encountered the most literal deadline of all: she had a sudden stroke and died on the spot, leaving behind only a handful of manuscript pages and a cache of frustrated notes.
The name on my wall wasn’t supposed to be encouraging; it was supposed to be menacing: Don’t end up dead and obscure near a riverbank with nothing to show for yourself. But after a while the Post-it fell behind my desk, and—more than a little relieved—I never bothered to replace it.
My relationship to deadlines, like that of almost everyone I know, is full of contradictions. I crave them and avoid them, depend on them and resent them. Due dates form the rhythm of my life as a journalist, and there is some comfort in these external expectations. But a deadline is also a train barrelling down the track, and you’re the one strapped to the rails. The time-sensitive obligations that add both structure and suspense to our lives—tax returns, loan payments, license renewals, job applications, event planning, teeth cleanings, biological clocks—can inspire nauseating dread as much as plucky action.
As the last day to complete a task approaches, we all respond to the pressure differently. Some (well-adjusted, diligent) people jump in, figuring that the anxiety of an unpaid bill or an unfinished project is far more painful than the difficulty of sticking to a sensible schedule. But others, like me, live in blissful denial—at least until the last minute, when, fuelled by adrenaline, caffeine, and self-loathing, we bolt to the end, vowing that we’ll do it all differently next time (we won’t). And still others, like Murphy, dismiss deadlines altogether, believing them to be at best imaginary and at worst anathema to creativity. This laissez-faire philosophy doesn’t quite jibe with a results-driven definition of success. One natural moral of Murphy’s demise is that in shirking our responsibilities we shrink our potential. And so most of us keep making to-do lists and grunting through the finish line—if not to please others then to stave off the existential fear of what might happen if we don’t.
In “The Deadline Effect,” the magazine editor Christopher Cox assures us that he is a true expert on his subject. “Professionally obliged to care about deadlines,” he has become a seasoned dispenser of constraints and expectations, and, in turn, a coaxer and a cajoler of those who must meet them. You might think that after years of working deadline enforcement he’d have sworn off the stuff. But Cox is a zealous proselytizer of “the deadline effect”—the transformative work that happens at the eleventh hour.
Cox writes that his conversion to the cause of deadlines began on the job. Skeptics should consider the cautionary tale—and wondrous cure—of a features writer named John, who is “famous for blowing deadlines.” (Though we never learn John’s last name, I remain haunted by this story; it is every writer’s nightmare to have her editor write a tell-all.) Unlike Esther Murphy, John eventually turns something in, but it’s always a trial for everyone involved, requiring “dozens of phone calls, countless emails, and a lot of anxious waiting.”
One day, Cox tries an experiment. He tells John that a major cover story is due, absolutely and without exception, a week before it really needs to be done. (This is not an uncommon trick of the trade: “No sane editor would ever tell a writer the actual deadline for a story.”) And then the miraculous occurs: the night before Cox’s fake-out date, John starts dropping paragraphs into a Google doc. The piece is ready ahead of schedule, and Cox is chuffed with his wily scheme. Setting a “decoy deadline,” he writes, “promised, in essence, the productivity equivalent of the full-court press.”
To Cox, John is a small success with a big lesson. We often summon the will to do our best work when we think we’re down to the buzzer—but by then it’s too late to actually do it. It’s only by mentally manipulating ourselves to act early and often that we can ever do spectacular things. Cox tells us that all his subjects “have learned how to work like it’s the last minute before the last minute.”
If you’re the kind of person who sets the kitchen clock ten minutes fast and still shows up late for dinner reservations, you may doubt the efficacy of this approach. And Cox concedes that a single person can squirm out of any overhanging chore and still justify the delinquency. But a group of people, he argues, become entangled by their common goals—and the net of deadlines becomes harder to wriggle out of. In Cox’s anatomy of organizations—where the price and profit of timeliness can be extreme—deadlines function a little like arteries: they’re the structures that keep blood circulating at the right pace and the heart pumping on the right beat.
What does John’s decoy deadline look like scaled up? Cox takes the example of the Telluride ski resort, in Colorado. Every year, Telluride’s C.E.O., Bill Jensen, tells his staff that the slopes must open by Thanksgiving. The catch is that they don’t need to open until the week after Christmas, which accounts for twenty per cent of skiing tourism for the year. Cox calls this trick “a soft open with teeth.” Soft because the real pressure is still a ways away, but toothy because it isn’t just an exercise: the ski lifts really run and the snow guns really blow. This approach gives the staff a chance to converge, collaborate, and trouble-shoot. Instead of epic meltdowns, you just get everyday mistakes. (You might say that the ski mountain becomes a molehill.) Jensen compares the early opening to wrapping Christmas presents. “For Thanksgiving,” he tells Cox, “all we had to do is get the present in the box. On December 8th, I’d like to have the box wrapped with some nice wrapping paper. Somewhere around December 18th to 20th, let’s put the ribbon on that package and we’re ready to go.”
The soft opening is a tried-and-true tactic. Stores and restaurants often start with a “friends and family” run before welcoming the public. Cox argues that this approach can also help “pathologically tardy writers” and other solo actors struggling to hit personal targets. Soft deadlines, he writes, can become “a way of gaining the virtues of the deadline effect (focus, urgency, cooperation) with none of the vices (rashness, desperation, incompleteness).” And there’s another piece to add to the Christmas analogy: ideally, you should get a reward—or a punishment—at the end. Some people are motivated by shiny things, others by shame.
I considered putting “soft deadline with teeth” on another Post-it—right around the moment I realized that this piece was due the next day and that I should probably put a pot of coffee on the stove instead. But if I was dubious about Cox’s methods I was even more dubious about my own. And though Cox may have learned his tricks as a deadline enforcer, he knows better than to preach without practice. He carefully balances being the oracle who knows what’s best for us—each chapter is summed up with M.B.A.-friendly catchphrases—and the grunt who’s seen the worst.
To truly appreciate the stakes of deadline-setting, Cox embedded as a Best Buy salesperson at the most important—and most terrible—time of year: Black Friday and the pre-holiday rush. The chapter recounting his experience is chillingly titled: “Becoming ‘A Mission-Driven Monster.’ ” Cox takes the phrase from a Houston Chronicle article about the streamlined rollout of NASA’s Apollo program. He admits that it may be “too grandiose” to compare selling discount DVD players to travelling to the moon, but both efforts, he writes, reveal “how even a giant corporation [can] remake itself to meet the challenge of one particularly important deadline.”