Deadline Day Quotes & Sayings

Our modern, deadline-a-day lifestyle overtaxes our adrenal glands, which end up overproducing cortisol, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to sleep and can put you at risk for a heart attack. Raised cortisol also boosts your insulin levels, which can cause you to pack on the pounds, especially around the midsection. — Suzanne Somers

I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is. — William Monahan

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

How did it come to this? How else but through
The course of years, and what its workings do
To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals,
Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals.

Our energy deceived us. Blessed with the knack
To get things done, we thought to get it back
Each time we lost it, just by taking breath -
And some of us are racing yet as we face death.

Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly.
I'm struggling with a deadline, God knows why,
And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me
The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly. — Clive James

I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

When I was getting ready for the release of 'Deadline,' when it was coming out soon, I decided that the appropriate way to get people excited about the book would be to write a novella in 30 pieces and publish a piece on my blog every day for a month ... during a convention, a week-and-a-half-long trip to New York, and a doll traders' expo. — Seanan McGuire

My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment. — Robert W. Floyd

Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells. — Tim Kreider

I sit in places like Costa Coffee in Banstead and write rubbish. I need a deadline. I think about the 44 tour dates and keep imagining standing in front of all these people. Then every day I write 15 jokes minimum. — Tim Vine

I knew I was putting you under immense pressure when I rejected your work the other day. I set an impossible deadline - yet you have met it with work that I can only call outstanding. As your teacher, I had to push you to your limits so that you could recognize your own true potential. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

We always give our best when our back is against the wall. We will write a superlative essay when pushing hard against a deadline, make the most innovative presentation when our job is in jeopardy, and study the hardest when the exam is the next day. — Twinkle Khanna

When I am writing a novel, though, then it's usually three or four hours a day. Ideally, right after lunch until three or four, but sometimes picking up again around ten, going until a touch after midnight. I rarely write in the morning, unless I'm on deadline. I do like rewriting in the morning, though. Guess it's the way my brain's put together. Or, the way it's falling apart. — Stephen Graham Jones

Helping me. It's a full-time job, and I am grateful for your concern for my reader friends. Of course, thanks to my daughter and sons, who pull together - bringing me iced green tea and understanding my sometimes crazy schedule. I love that you know you're still first, before any deadline. Thank you to my mom, Anne Kingsbury, and to my sisters, Tricia and Sue. Mom, you are amazing as my assistant - working day and night sorting through the mail from my readers. I appreciate you more than you'll ever know. Traveling together these past years for Extraordinary Women and Women of Joy events has given us times that we will always treasure. Now we will be at Women — Karen Kingsbury

So on the Tuesday night deadline, while Abu Qatada was appealing to European Court judges, the Home Secretary, who thought the deadline was Monday night, was partying with X Factor judges. When the Home Secretary is accused of not knowing what day of the week it is, confusion and chaos have turned into farce. — Yvette Cooper

Momentum is a fragile force. Its worst enemy: procrastination. Its best friend: a deadline (think Election Day). Implication no. 1 (and there is no no. 2): Get to work! NOW! — Tom Peters

When you first quit your regular job and you become a full-time writer, you are paralyzed with free time. You have so much free time. When you are at home, you have a guitar. There's a cat. You got to find ways to create an environment when writing is like going to work. Be efficient with the hours you put into the book. So I go there the same time, every day - like 7:30 am - and I leave around 2 pm, or longer, if I have a deadline. — Matt De La Pena

MURRY: It's not that, it's just ... I don't really get it. I usually find myself staring at the midnight deadline filled with regrets both for opportunities and loved ones missed. It's another day closer to the end. The last thing I feel like doing is counting down to some wild celebration. It just seems so sad to say goodbye to a year and know that it's gone forever and you can't go back to it. Not to relive, not to correct.
NOEL: I've never thought about it that way.
MURRY: There's something so final about it. It's the period at the end of the sentence.
NOEL: The New Year's resolution. — Hillary DePiano

I'm nicer on tax day than I am when I'm on deadline. — Laurie Notaro

I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be. — Michael Showalter

I do sit down every day and make myself write. I want 2,000 words every day or 3 single-space pages a day. I think if you are on a deadline, you have to be disciplined. If you turn things in late, you will find yourself without a contract. — Michelle Moran

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it ... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer. — Hunter S. Thompson

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.) — Erica Jong

if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you're robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you're done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. — Cal Newport

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it
if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure. — Warren Ellis

Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. "He doesn't say, 'You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,'" Brogan said. "He says, 'I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?' Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You're working hard for yourself. It's a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work." And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn't have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The — Ashlee Vance

I liked the way they treated the first, second, and third place finishers equally. It was an amazing year. I only entered two song contests this year; I won one and placed second in the other. And I entered each of them a day or two before the deadline. — Arthur Godfrey