by Serguey Shinder
For a long time I believed I worked well under pressure, and I said it in interviews as though it were a strength. What I actually meant, though I did not see it clearly then, was that pressure was the only thing that reliably made me work at all. Give me a task with someone waiting at the end of it and I was focused, fast, and unbothered by distraction. Give me the same task with a month of open space around it and I would produce nothing for three weeks and everything in the last two days.
The work I did in those last two days was not my best work. It was fast and it was finished, which felt like the same thing at the time, and it usually passed. But it was thin. It had no second pass, no period of sitting with the problem, none of the quiet reconsideration that turns something adequate into something good. I had been mistaking the adrenaline of the deadline for competence, when what it actually produced was a competent-looking first draft under duress.
Worse, the pattern quietly determined what I worked on. Anything with a person waiting got done. Anything without one did not, regardless of how important it was, which meant the shape of my year was decided entirely by other people's urgency rather than by any judgment of my own. The most valuable things I could have done were almost always the things nobody was chasing me for, and those were precisely the things that never happened.
I understood the mechanism eventually. External deadlines work because they carry a social cost for missing them, and I am, like most people, far more responsive to letting someone down than to letting myself down. That is not a character flaw so much as a fact about how attention works, and treating it as a moral failing had kept me trying to fix it with resolve, which never worked, instead of with structure, which does.
So I stopped trying to generate the discipline internally and started borrowing it. I tell someone what I am going to have ready and when. I show unfinished work to a person on a fixed day. I make the thing that has no natural deadline acquire an artificial one with a human being attached to it, because that is the only kind my attention has ever taken seriously.
It feels like a workaround, and it is one. But I would rather build around how I actually function than keep waiting to become the person who is motivated purely from within. The important work does not come with anyone waiting at the end of it. That is exactly why it needs someone waiting, and why arranging for that person is now part of the work itself.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply