A significant slice of the negative emotion experienced by a typical person pertains to situations that have nothing to do with what lies at hand. Typically, stress and anxiety exert drag on your productivity like a parachute on a runner. But stress and anxiety can be beneficial at certain times and in limited quantities. One benefit is that it can help you achieve laser-like focus and promote your task to the existential level. A surprising number of people have never experienced this kind of focus, and are unaware of the kind of productivity it enables.
Another potentially helpful but potentially negative emotion is urgency. Urgency is never created—only recognized. Our time is always limited, and whether we realize it or not, there are tremendous outcomes hanging on how effectively we use it.
The ideal place to position your perspective is on the knife edge between the belief that you have enough time to do everything that matters, and that every second you waste significantly reduces what you care about most. You have enough time to do everything that matters, but not one moment extra.
Deadlines are priorities expressed on a calendar. They help generate urgency. By setting them, you recognize the urgency of getting your tasks completed, and you will activate certain mental mechanisms that help you get started faster, work harder, and finish earlier. Deadlines become particularly powerful tools when combined with backwards planning to break the deadline of a large task into earlier deadlines for its prerequisite components. Breaking up a task over time with deadlines at each step propagates the urgency of the task into each day in place of the complacency and procrastination that generally occurs when you perceive that you have plenty of time remaining to complete a task.