(This is my 400th post over the last 5 years.)

The funny thing about deadlines is that the deadlier they are the more likely you are to fall off.

Deadline from Wikipedia: The term deadline originated from prison camps during war, and referred to a physical line or boundary. Guards would shoot any prisoner who crossed the deadline.

Now days businesses and especially startups use it on themselves in an attempt to get things supposedly done faster. Three out of four venture-backed startups fail, according to research by Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School lecturer. Ghosh also found that more than 95 percent of startups fall short of their initial projections, from the award winning article The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship

From the article:
So it should come as little surprise that entrepreneurs experience more anxiety than employees. In the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, 34 percent of entrepreneurs–4 percentage points more than other workers–reported they were worried. And 45 percent of entrepreneurs said they were stressed, 3 percentage points more than other workers.

“But if we don’t have deadlines then we wont get anything done” I hear often from young entrepreneurs. There are other options such as timelines, milestones or benchmarks that are not necessarily so time focused and deadly.

Maybe if wannabee entrepreneurs were not in such a rush and stopped putting so much
pressure on themselves and other members in their team the results from startups would be improved.

The Irony is that by imposing deadlines on ourselves it seems to put us under so much pressure that we want to finish as soon as possible, thus the need to impose even more deadlines, ha!