Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.

One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly. When you don’t trust the date, or when you think it’s impossible to do everything someone’s telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.

We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give authority to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals--to animal reflexes that produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish political subjects, push-button automatons.

the word “deadline” has its American origin in Civil War prison camps;

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Everyone needs deadlines. Even the beavers. They loaf around all summer, but when they are faced with the winter deadline, they work like fury. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d stagnate.

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

They were locked into the past and unwittingly locking themselves out of the future. Leaders do this to themselves and their organizations all the time.

Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines.

The walls of self-preservation that you build for today are the walls of self-imprisonment for tomorrow. Boundaries that you establish in your life as a protection for yourself today will feel like constraints tomorrow.

Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

That's why they imprison our husbands, our brothers, and our sons; that's why they impose themselves on us in such a brutal manner.