Would you believe that there are some schools and universities that are dropping deadlines to ease stress for students?
Forgive me if I sound like one of those grouchy octogenarians who like to lash out at those pesky “whippersnappers.” But when I was in school, dropping deadlines wasn’t an option. Teachers weren’t willing to give us much in the way of breaks when an assignment came due.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean to say my teachers were mean. I always thought of it as them trying to better prepare us for the real world.
After all, once you get out of school and start a career, you’ll face deadlines. Your boss doesn’t want to hear excuses when a big project or report is due. They want the finished product. Perhaps they’d be delighted to have it sooner than asked for. But they’re not going to be happy to wait for it.
For my particular career, TV, deadlines became an even more critical part of daily life. When I worked as a promotion producer, I had to have a finished promo on the air in time to promote whatever show I was highlighting. It wouldn’t have worked if the promo came on after the show had already aired.
When I worked in a newsroom, we had deadlines all day. In some cases, we had more than one deadline during the day. As a news manager, I have to enforce multiple deadlines over the course of a day.
Dropping deadlines in my line of work isn’t an option.
So why should be an option for today’s students?
Mark Taylor, who teaches the philosophy of religion at Columbia University, recently wrote an OpEd for The Washington Post. He cites a pair of articles about this dropping deadlines stance.
Taylor writes in his OpEd that the changes some learning institutions justify the change by claiming it reduces student stress in the post-COVID world.
School is very stressful. College, for many of us, was even more stressful.
The real world, however, beats them both for most of us, I think.
“We fail to prepare students for later adult life if we excuse them from all deadlines,” Taylor writes. “The enforcement of deadlines is an important lesson in effective time management, which is required for a productive life and a functioning society. Constraints make us stronger rather than weaker, and deadlines foster the self-discipline that makes innovative work and creative interactions possible.”
I couldn’t agree more.
My dad can be a master of procrastination. My mom tends to be someone who wants to tackle something faster.
I have my moments of both. Maybe it’s a touch of imposter syndrome that kicks in once in a while. Or maybe, for certain things, I like to spend a little extra time strategizing.
But I try to get things done on time. When there’s a hard deadline — and most deadlines in what I do are hard deadlines — I meet them. On the rare occasions I don’t, I let my bosses know what the problems are. If they can’t adjust the deadline, then I make it work.
That takes time management skills. It takes strategizing. And it takes discipline.
Time management is a skill that seems to be lacking in some younger folks I’ve worked with. I shudder to think how future workers might handle deadlines when they’re being allowed to “ignore” them in school.
I can only hope that journalism schools out there don’t take that approach. If they do, my industry’s going to be in big trouble in the coming years.
