Poems

Deadline Pressure

78 Comments

Seeing with considerable satisfaction the way a ticking clock got the deadbeats in the US Congress to finally pass a piece of (imperfect) legislation, I commissioned Schuyler Tyler Wyler, America’s Rhyming Poet Laureate, to write a few lines about the value of time limits.

And of course I told him I needed to have something in hand no later than 20 minutes after the challenge was issued. If he couldn’t deliver, he should just forget it, I said, knowing full well that STW never passes up a commission.

His secret? He becomes a lot less picky as the time grows short.

Many lines will man diminish,
casting shadows o’er his heart.
Like a line emblazoned “finish”
set too far from one marked “start.”

Lengthy lines can form for tickets
Timberlines sit near the tree
Don’t cross lines set up by pickets.
Don’t cross lines prefaced by “fe”.

One line always worth preserving
though he’ll never, ever ask you,
every guy thinks he’s deserving.
it’s the one that follows “mascu”.

An exciting line is “chorus”.
An archaic one is “clothes”.
Lines called “border” can be porous.
Lines with water can get froze.

There are many lines that plague us:
Lines for greeting at a wedding.
And the kind they make in Vegas.
Not for marriage, but for betting.

Tucked behind a velvet curtain
sultry lines designed for “chat”.
In a hospital for certain
please avoid a line that’s “flat”.

One line makes all writers tremble
just one line gets in their head.
Makes their noggins disassemble.
That’s a line that’s clearly “dead”.

For a deadline makes them humble.
Whether genius or a jerk.
It’s the deadline makes them crumble.
Sets them free to do their work.

When have you been assisted by an inflexible deadline?

78 thoughts on “Deadline Pressure”

  1. Morning all. 20 minutes, huh Dale? Excellent.

    One of the reasons that I like my job is that it’s filled with deadlines. Every one of my participants will get on the plane on the first day of the program whether I’m ready or not; this is great motivation to get my act together. Who wants 350 confused people standing around the pool deck with no umbrella drinks in their hands? I have told people for years that every program having a beginning and an ending is one of the things I like; no projects that stretch on forever with no end in sight!

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  2. I happen to be writing for another blog about how I became a much better teacher when I scheduled things out. For instance my students always knew what would happen each day for at least the next week. So, as VS says, I gave myself and my students lots of deadlines.

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  4. Good morning. That Schuyler Tyler Wyler is an amazing guy. His name makes me laugh as well as his poetry.

    I am always facing a deadline on just about anything I need to do because that’s the way I am. I wish that I could avoid putting things off until I barely have enough time to get them done. In fact, I regularly tell myself that I shouldn’t wait so long to get things done because I don’t like struggling to get work done against a deadline, but I never manage to follow my own advice about this. I usually meet my deadlines. I don’t do as an old guy told me he did. He said he handled deadlines by drawing a red line through the deadlines.

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  5. There are a lot of sets that I designed that wouldn’t have gotten done (note that I don’t say “finished” – that is different than “done”) if it hadn’t been for that inflexible “opening night” deadline. But the real biggie was my master’s thesis. I told my advisor that I needed to set up regular meetings with her and I was to have a section or chapter ready for her at every meeting. I had been puttering for months and needed to establish some deadlines for myself to get the actual writing done. Thankfully my advisor was willing to assist in my plan (“if that’s what it takes for you go get this written, then let’s do it” was about what she said). 100 or so pages of writing seems daunting until you break it down into 10-page sections every few weeks, or at least that’s how it worked for me. And with those deadlines, I was done and defended by spring graduation. Phew.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    What a poetry coup STW. Did Dale set a submission deadline for you? Did he hassle you about your submission? Is he hard to work for?

    A looming April 15 deadline from Uncle Sam each annum does wonders for my financial organization. I am getting audited by the MNCare Health system Jan. 26. It was to have been Dec. 28, but the burglary and resulting smashed yet still-locked file cabinet which held the needed records, prompted me to request a new date. So I am madly preparing for the deadline. Not much creativity contained there!

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  7. OT: PJ the next BBC is at Lou and my house at 2pm Sunday Jan??? Can somebody help me out here? I did not write down the date and Anna’s notes do not contain it either! Oh me. Book is Twinkie Deconstructed by Steven Ettinger, which Lou is reading for me. I will host the discussion and participate in a meeting about a book I will not get to read. TV and Radio hosts do this all the time so why not me?

    Re: artwork–do not expect much. This is my hobby and I am not getting much time for it.

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  8. Yesterday was my most recent deadline issue. I gave dale some notice that I wanted to do a roger miller blog and he said he’d keep the date open. I got it to him because I had to. I couldn’t get the thing to flow the way I wanted but that was my problem. I got it to him with barely enough time to edit my chickenpeckings and he fixed it and got it in in time for his daily submission.
    I like schuyler’s spelling of what I assume is skylar in my name book. very poetic. I’ll bet he is glad his last name wasn’t mahaskowitz

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  9. My artist friend in NJ and I have had many long discussions about the artistic process. We both have spent our professional lives using deadlines the same way. Neither of us can work when a deadline is distant. When the deadline is scary close, fear sets in, we get a shot of adrenaline and we can suddenly become productive. I did this for thirty years as a freelance writer. For thirty years, it worked, and I never missed a deadline.

    I’d like to end the story there, but I used my little trick one time too many. It’s a complicated story, but I had an assignment three years ago that I attempted to do the way I’ve always done them, letting the deadline approach. It turned out I had mis-remembered the deadline, I got too late, and the final result was a catastrophe that led to the article being rejected. Worse, I let down an editor who didn’t deserve that. I took that as a sign I was out of step with modern practices. I’ve not done any professional writing since that disaster and almost surely will never take another assignment.

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    1. I dont like your response to failure. I fail all the time. Retool your program and figure out how to get the deadline right or change and set your own deadlines and submit finished pieces rather than presenting commissioned pieces. You are too good at writing to give it up because of a human hiccup.

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      1. Your failures, I think, are due to bad luck or to an unconventional work style. My failure was related to aging and thus is tied to a process that has changed me and will continue to make me less and less reliable as a working professional. As I get older I find myself increasingly confused about dates until it is almost rare for me to remember one correctly. You are young enough to use your failures to gain something; I am not.

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        1. Ah, facing our failures as we age. Not fun for us, is it, old man? We are kindred spirits, are we not?
          My life of course is full of failures, more than for most people but then I have always been a big risk-taker. So more risk, more failures. Somehow the failures accumulate more than the successes, in part because I am paying for the failure now in money and other ways. I pastored many old men. This point of view was not uncommon.

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        2. Speaking of old men losing track: I meant to add that you, too, were a big risk-taker, right?

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        5. In the end, Steve don’t know about you, but I do not regret any of the risks, almost wish I had taken more.

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        6. Linda, having the date on a calendar is a Good Idea. But I have two bad habits related to that. 1) I forget to look at the calendar. 2) I put the wrong date down in the calendar. I do these things all the time!

          The biggest risk I took is the one that I live with now, the one that chews on my leg every day. I can’t help wishing I had taken a few more risks, particularly with questionable women in questionable circumstances. I chose bad times to be cautious.

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        7. Don’t forget the third calendar failure, which is one I am prone to – leaving said calendar at home and then making plans with others when I am out and about. I just got myself in trouble with this issue recently with BBC and my other book club!

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        8. I know that I am slowing down as I get older. Still, I don’t have any health problems that prevent me from doing everything or almost everything I have always done. I even intend to do more of some things than I did before because I have retired from working for an employer and have more time to do what I want to do.

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    2. I don’t suppose, Steve, that you could extend the same kindness to yourself that you extend to others? Seems a like the human condition to now and then mis-remember something or blow a deadline. Just sayin’….

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        2. Steve, would you forgive someone else for what you did (at least eventually)? It does sound like you messed up…but be kind to yourself. Yes, be honest with yourself – which you are by admitting you blew it and that you’re not good with dates or deadlines – but show some kindness to yourself, too.

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    3. Steve – I’d hazard a guess that I am younger than you by a bit. I mis-remember dates a lot (or, just as often, think I remember a date when something is to happen and nothing is on the calendar). My trick is to have technology provide me an assist. My calendar at work (and at home) provides me with pop-up reminders when I’m logged into my computer about upcoming deadlines or things I need to take care of on a particular day. Admittedly, I have to add in these reminders to my calendar, but even that helps me remember better as I have the muscle memory of adding it into the calendar. If i didn’t have these reminders I would forget to schedule appointments, make necessary calls, and get information to folks who need it for work.

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      1. “Younger by a bit?” You have me rolling on the floor laughing. I look at you and see little chunks of eggshell from when you pipped out last week. Your system would work for me except these days I have so FEW appointments that I don’t get to build up habits to support them. If I had three appointments a week, I could probably keep them. Instead I have one appointment in three weeks, and it is HARD to remember to check the calendar.

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        1. Steve, at this point I would say that you have decided you do not WANT to write professionally any more.

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        2. Steve, you’re making this too difficult. If you write them down IN the computer, the computer will TELL YOU everytime you turn it on… even give yourself reminders a month, week, day or hour ahead of time.
          It’s do-able.
          Remember, there is no ‘try’, there is only ‘do’.

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  10. I face deadlines all the time at work, and were it not for deadlines, I would not get anything done. Oh how I wish i were more self disciplined.

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  11. A lot of my stuff is seasonal and comes around every year. I always tell my other involved parties I would rather be ther at the deadline rather than 51 weeks early for next year.

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  12. OT: I am doing a pastel of the Grand Canyon in blues while listening to Paul Winter’s two Grand Canyon albums shuffled with some Navajo flute music. At this moment life is in sync. Won’t last, but this brief moment it is.

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    1. You will love this: I was sitting here drawing, feeling all at peace with the world and not a useless stupid old man when my wife walked in and told me shirt was inside-out.

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      1. She’s no better. Last night she started a cup of tea and lost it. That’s not so odd. She sometimes has two cups going at once. But the one from last night has disappeared. We know she did because the cup is gone, but we cannot find it in this apartment. See it does get worse.

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        3. No it’s not in the mw. She has made about four cups of tea to day for one thing and drunk about 1.25 cups worth of that. She only heats water for tea in the mw. She says it tastes funny from the hot pot I keep in my art room or in a tea kettle. And this morning she announced that coke in a plastic bottle does not taste right, that it has to be in cans.

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      2. Tell her all artists work better with inside-out shirts.

        Once I met up with a friend in a coffeeshop in Duluth, had a great time chatting. As we were going our separate ways she told me my shirt was inside out (to ease my mortification a bit, she said she had done the same thing at least once).

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        1. Yes, we’ve all done it. Teenager is mortified when I do this, especially since I don’t always rush to fix the problem! Of course, Teenager is mortified by almost everything I do.

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        2. I wore my sweater inside out when giving a talk to my daughter’s middle school class. I discovered it was inside out in the middle of the talk. My daughter was very embarrassed by this. She told me not to do anything in any of her classes in the future and I didn’t. I think my daughter and I can laugh about the inside out sweater now, but not back when that happened. She was a somewhat private person as a youngster and probably didn’t want me to speak before her class even if I had avoided wearing my sweater inside out.

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        4. We could probably have quite a discussion, Jim, about things mothers do that mortify their children. I would start with one of the most horrendous of possible mortifications: your mom decides your face is unclean so she <licks her handkerchief and washes you in public!

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        5. Isn’t that pretty much what teenagers do? Be mortified by the actions of the adults that are their parents? I’ve been there and done that, admittedly a long time ago. I admit to still being mortified at a lot of the things adults do but for different reasons.

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        6. OK, I get points for NEVER having done this. This was one of the few promises that I made myself as a parent.

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        7. We continuously embarass our teenager. It is getting slightly better, though. She now jokes about our weirdness instead of trying to keep us anonymous and out of sight.

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        9. We are bird watchers. We talk about birds, and keep bird feeders in the yard. I fund raise for the music programs in the schools, and I speak at concerts when she is present. We are known in town as psychololgists who work with teens and children, and many of them disclose to her that we are their therapists. She considers everything we do in public or in front of her friends to be strange.

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        10. Sorry PJ, somebody else got a reply in before mine. Mine was in response to Steve and the “licking your fingers and wiping something off your child’s face”

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        11. Sorry I budged in line! I didn’t see the vs and thought the comment was directed at me. Oh, the self-centereredness of the only child! (me, I mean)

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      3. I am going to assuage my mortification by going to see The Hobbit this afternoon. Sometime when I have the courage and the verbal skills, I will write a blog about my relationship to my daughter. But why is it that people think it is a compliment to her to say she is like me when she does a good sermon or service or piece of writing? Shessh. How much insight does it take to give her credit on her own. Why not say that she nothing like me when she gets everything done far ahead of time, which she does?

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        2. Looked it up. Yes it is. So I must look up C.S. Lewis’s and D.L. Sayers and celebrate them all.
          The problem with The Hobbit is now that he has made it a three part film, I wonder if I will live long enough to see them all.

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  13. The times when inflexible deadlines have helped me? So many times, but I’ll concentrate on just one time.

    First one that came to mind: the births of my daughters. I didn’t know when the deadline was – but they let me know – and at that point, it was inevitable: I would become a parent. Ready or not. Sometimes I think I’m still not ready to be a parent (despite the fact that the kids are pretty much grown up and I even have a granddaughter).

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    1. If we married when (and only when) we were truly ready for it, nobody would get married. If we had children when we were truly ready for that, births would absolutely stop. This is the human condition. Things keep happening, whether or not we are ready for them, so we just do the best we can at dealing with them.

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      1. You can’t be serious, Steve. I don’t for one minute believe that. For lots of people, perhaps even most, that may be true, but no, it’s not true for everyone.

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        2. Same here, Linda. My friend, Auralee, has adopted two little girls from China, and she was as ready as you can be for motherhood. I even know a couple of couples who waited a good long time before they committed to marriage, and their marriages are true partnerships.

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        3. Put me on that list. I spent two years researching and reading up on adoption while I finished up my degree (didn’ want to be doing school and adoption paperwork at same time). The morning after my last final I turned in my first round of adoption paperwork. Blasted through the process – 9 months later I was on the plane to China!

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        4. Well, I think I fall squarely in the camp that Steve described – not ready for the big things of life. Even when I’ve thought I was Ready, I realized as I got into it, that I really wasn’t ready, in fact sometimes quite ill-prepared. I just can’t always predict what things like marriage or parenthood (especially parenthood to more than one child) will be like – and how it will affect me – until I start living it. I’m not bragging, far from it; it’s just the way I am.

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        5. Edith, you may not feel like you’d ever be prepared, and perhaps you’re right, I don’t know. But to state as Steve did, that no one, NO ONE, would, that’s different. I’m quite relieved to know that some people carry on quite nicely in spite of all the obstacles in front of them. Put me in the line of folks who believe that no matter how difficult the journey, there’s a way to make it worthwhile.

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        6. No, I’m saying that even when I’ve thought I’m Ready, I find out that I’m really not.

          That’s why I feel like Steve described me – I went ahead and became a mom (as one example) and I wasn’t truly ready. I THOUGHT I was ready, but really I wasn’t. Sort of like a baseball player up to bat and thinks he is ready to hit the ball – and he IS ready – but only as long as it’s a straight fastball. But if it’s a curve ball – he is not ready.

          I guess I feel that I’m like the hitter who is only ready for the fastball but not the curve ball (or a knuckleball or an off-speed pitch). There are really good hitters out there who are ready for any pitch and can hit any of them. But I’m not one of them.

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  14. Welcome, Schuyler Tyler Wyler, America’s Rhyming Poet Laureate! And a very cleaver poet you are, looking forward to your return.

    Graduation. That was when everything had to be done, in, complete – worked well. I’ll never forget the relief, and finally the feeling that I could READ anything I wanted to… I think it’s the main reason I never got another degree.

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      1. I think Schuyler has been “hiding in the wings” as a ghost writer for Dale and has now come out in the open.

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  15. I think the most useful deadlines I’ve had were probably the deadlines to be out of the old apartment when moving. At the start of a move, I always think I will be very efficient and organized, with the boxes neatly packed with like items, so that I can write “KITCHEN” or “DINING ROOM” on the outside of the box and unpack with confidence that everything in the box belongs in that room. Then the last week before the move everything just gets put into any box where there’s room left, and I end up taking along things like magazines that I meant to sort through and recycle, and food from the refrigerator that I should have used up in advance. If I didn’t have to be out of the apartment, I’d probably still have stuff there a year later, waiting to be sorted and dealt with.

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  16. I thought I would return to work after the holidays to teach my music classes and choose new music for my choirs with reasonable deadlines that were easy to meet. Instead i returned to many new deadlines that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with other people meeting THEIR deadlines. But I like these people and I want to support them. What can I say?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIMJBDj_JkE

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