Wtf is a deadline? Showtime, missing the bus, time walls, check-ins, &+

If this blog post contains only this paragraph and bullet list, it’s because it was showtime and this was all I’d written. The post is about distinguishing different kinds of things that are often all called “deadlines”. I really like showtime, and I liked the idea of writing being like a kind of showtime, although in practice this is quite hard to do for anything except an exam. I may schedule a time to write this post in full, but for now (Oct 4th) I’m simply writing this and scheduling a time when it’ll be published: noon on Wednesday, October 7th. If you’re reading this text (and only this text) before then, there was a bug with my schedule publish feature 😂

• showtime – “however prepared we are, the audience is waiting”
• deadline time wall – go/no-go – “I miss the bus” is the extreme case
• check-in / estimate – may not be finished by this date, but I want to reorient
• experiment end – try a thing for a bit, and then reflect on it

(Written the following day, in my personal journal, and added, at the time: Man, I’m excited for the blogging showtime! Fascinating that it took me this long. This is just making it true that something of mine will get published every so often, but not with any sense of commitment or whatever. The consequences are just the quality of whatever’s published. And I guess in that sense it really is a showtime. Hm… yeah, feeling that.)

Okay, here I am, 3h 11mins before the publish date. This is my performance over the next 3h. I’m not going to do this every time, but in this case I think there’s a beauty to simply leaving the above paragraphs there and continuing from them, as they function as a kind of teaser for the topic of the post.

This is a model that has been percolating in my system for years, and it was animated by 2 main questions, that didn’t obviously have any thing to do with each other:

1. why, as a student, did I usually vastly prefer tests & exams over homework & projects?
2. what does it mean (in the context of designing the Complice goal-tracking system) to put a date on something you intend to do?

The model, like posts I’ve written about habits, expectations, commitments & accountability, distractions, and explanations, is a model that takes a word and says “you thought this was one thing? this is actually 2 things, and it’s worth knowing the difference.” In this case, there are at least 4, maybe more things. But let’s start with the difference between tests & homework.

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