Without a deadline you’re useless.

Let me give you an example. If I have a deadline, I produce twice as many blog posts.

Right now I’m seven days away from going to Europe which means everything I’m currently doing has to be finished quick smart.

Last week I had a day where I had nothing booked, no meetings and no phone calls. I put aside the whole day to write. Instead, what ended up happening was I sat there and watched YouTube, binged on Facebook and read a few articles.

In other words, I pissed the entire day up the wall and had nothing to show for it (nice one Timbo).

If you think about people on the brink of retirement, they suffer from the same problem. They think that when they retire, they can finally travel or learn the piano or spend time with their kids.

When these fun-loving folk finally reach retirement, they don’t do half of what they said they would. They waited their entire life to do the things they love and they don’t do it.

Saving up tasks to complete in the future is a complete waste of time. You need a deadline otherwise you’ll never get to your goals/tasks/dreams.

I make up deadlines.

A little hack I use is to make up deadlines.

Every Saturday is my writing day. It’s when I bust my chops to deliver you as many helpful articles I can, for free, with the most beautiful imagery I can find on the internet, that will inspire you and make you take action.

It’s bloody hard work.

To achieve this enormous weekly task that sucks up all my energy, I put a deadline at the end of the day.

I promise my girlfriend dinner at 6 pm every Saturday which means I have to be done by 5 pm. Failure to meet this deadline involves a slow and torturous death by my girlfriend who will never let me hear the end of being late to a romantic dinner date.

This deadline not only gives me a hard stop to be done writing by, but it also gives me something to look forward to. It makes all the pain and sweat of writing worth it. It’s how I celebrate.

If you struggle with deadlines, then try making up your own one.

Purposely place an event in your calendar right after the goal you want to achieve. Make it something you can’t get out of without experiencing a lot of pain (or in my case ‘death by girlfriend’).

The illusion of free time.

The best habit you can cultivate is to focus on ‘the doing’ no matter what day, time or month of the year we’re in.

The moment you need to set aside time is the moment nothing will happenand you’ll find your long lost friend called procrastination.

“When you don’t feel like it is the best time to work on your goals”

Whenever we have free time, we think we have all day when we don’t. Digital distractions can rob you of an entire day faster than I can drink a Matcha Latte.

Next time you hear yourself saying “I’ll do it during this block of free time” be suspicious of yourself. See through your own BS.

It’s all in the mind.

The battle of achieving your goals takes place in the mind mostly.

“Deadlines are just a way to sort of trick your brain into working with you rather than against you”

We’re wired to be fat, lazy bastards who should be scared of the big, bad world we live in.

Using reframe techniques like deadlines helps our mind think clearly and focus on what we want.

Our million-year-old brain is not there to make us win and so using deadlines is how we can program it to help us win big.

Deadlines are beautiful.

Until you’ve played around with deadlines, you won’t see the beauty in them like I do.

The reason I love deadlines is because they are such a simple hack.

Simplicity is beauty in disguise.

“We’re often led to believe that whatever we dream of in life is incredibly difficult and our chance of success is almost zero. When you discover 2–3 little life hacks like deadlines, you start to see the impossible becoming possible”

I never thought I’d have the time, creativity, stories or knowledge to ever be a blogger. It always sounded really hard.

I then used deadlines, habits, and energy from a clean diet to blog my way to my goals. It’s a beautiful thing when you can see how the world really works through tools like deadlines.

Deadlines work.

You can win at life.

All you need to do is pick a goal and whack a nice deadline activity at the end of it that gives you leverage against yourself to defeat procrastination.

Give deadlines a shot!