Thomas Edison had a practice of committing himself and his team to deadlines for completing inventions they had taken on—dates upon which they had promised to deliver the finished product to some waiting buyer. Imagine the pressure they must have felt when having to not just complete a task by a firm date but actually create something wholly new!
I had a colleague who referred to such deadlines as “action forcing events.” For him, like the knowledge that one is to be hanged, as Samuel Johnson said, they concentrated his mind wonderfully.
And though for some people the stress induced by impending deadlines might ultimately undermine, not help, their productivity, the point made by Edison and my colleague holds nevertheless as a broader one: that to accomplish anything productive, one’s focus and concentration are core.
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