Deadlines Can Be Deadly!

By Neva Bodin

With great fear and trepidation (how’s that for cliché?) I signed up to do two blogs for ACFW! I am a writer, although I swallow loudly, labeling myself as one. It feels like saying that sets me up for all kinds of expectations I might not be able to meet—expectations from others and myself.

However, in searching my lump of gray matter for a topic, I thought of deadlines. I have already done a short article on them for our church newsletter as well as for my reader newsletter. Then I found the ones posted already on the ACFW site. Super blogs!! Full of wise and helpful ideas.

I found the one written by DiAnn Mills in 2020 titled “Ensuring Your Deadline Doesn’t Kill You.” She has a twelve-step program to “take the dead out of deadline.”

This one, in particular, resonated with my article on deadlines and my theory as to why some of us instinctively dread them! Like my sentiments about air conditioning in the summer, I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines.

I decided to research where that word came from. Not a necessarily pleasant origin, which is perhaps why we don’t have a necessarily pleasant feeling about them!

In the 1860s, crossing a “deadline” could get you shot. It was a line drawn around a prison camp during the Civil War. Some of the earliest mentions are in prisoner-of-war diaries. “In a memorial addressed to President Lincoln in August 1864, by Union officers confined in Charleston, occurs the following passage with reference to the Andersonville prisoners:

“They are fast losing hope and becoming utterly reckless of life. Numbers, crazed by their sufferings, wander about in a state of idiocy. Others deliberately cross the ‘Dead Line’ and are remorselessly shot down.’” –Thomas Prentice Kettell, History of the Great Rebellion, 1866 –  https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/your-deadline-wont-kill-you, 2/1/2022

Maybe that’s why I respond to deadlines so well. I had great, and great-great, grandfathers who fought in the Civil War. (A genetic knowledge passed down of what deadlines mean?)

Retirement from a busy healthcare career has been a problem for me. Not only do I miss my work, but I miss having deadlines set by my career! Opposite for many other retirees I know.

I’m not likely to get shot over a deadline today, but I would be horribly embarrassed if I missed one. For free-lancing, deadlines are necessary and damaging to a career if missed. I meet those deadlines! Although I sometimes miss my monthly article in the church newsletter by a day or two.

However, adopting what seems to be a laissez-faire—an anything-goes—attitude in today’s culture, I let deadlines I set for myself slide. There may be legitimate reasons—I am not feeling well, something or someone more important takes my time, etc., etc., or I’m retired—so should I even have deadlines?

But writing for editors, publishers, freelancing for publications, and even our personal newsletters, usually requires strict deadlines. Meeting a deadline, whether to someone else or to ourselves, I believe, is showing respect to everyone concerned.

I try not to make New Year’s resolutions, but I will make more of an effort to follow my own deadlines. And to up the ante, since I am reward-oriented, I will think of a reward when I meet them that is hopefully not food-related. And I will thank my heavenly Father that I don’t have the concern of a heavenly deadline to add to my earthly ones. If there was one, I’ve already
met it.

Neva Bodin writes to entertain, promote laughter, love, and faith through fiction and nonfiction. She writes short stories, newsletters, poetry, and freelance articles. Writing for all ages, she draws from her life of nursing and growing up on a farm in rural North Dakota.