ENCORE How To Never Miss a Deadline
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Avalon is driven, creative, and… can't meet a deadline to save her life. In her defense, she's a card-carrying member of the gig economy, juggling a complicated schedule as a DJ and visual artist. Avalon's tried to organize her life using a bullet journal, but procrastination keeps getting in the way of her career pursuits. On this episode of How To!, the second in a two-part series on time management, we talk to Christopher Cox, author of The Deadline Effect: How To Work Like It's the Last Minute Before the Last Minute. He explains why concrete deadlines, the shorter the better, can actually help Avalon's creativity. And he gives all of us tips on how to set the perfect deadline—and never miss it.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, how-to listeners. It's Charles Duhigg. And as we're getting how-to ready for 26, we wanted to play a rerun for you. One of my favorite shows where the host was David Epstein about how to meet your deadlines, which particularly as the New Year's here might be something that we're all thinking about. So let me hand it over to David and take it away. Remember this one college professor being like, why are you late? |
| 0:37.4 | And I was like, you know, it's early. It was a 10 a.m. class. And he's like, it's not that early. And just like I, when I'm late now, like those are the things that come flooding to me. It's like all those memories that like, that it's my fault. you know, it's a personal failing that like, |
| 0:39.7 | that I can't be on time or that I can't meet deadlines. |
| 0:38.2 | I really don't want to let people down welcome to how to |
| 0:45.9 | I'm science writer David Epstein deadlines can't live with them can't live without them or |
| 0:51.9 | something like that as a, I have a long |
| 0:55.0 | relationship with deadlines, from a startup I worked at where I had to file a story every single day |
| 0:59.8 | to book projects that I have to time out over multiple years. And a lot of the writers who have |
| 1:04.8 | mentored me and that I've admired have really specific views on deadlines. Like Tim Layden, my favorite |
| 1:09.6 | writer when I was at Sports Illustrated. |
| 1:11.4 | He was sort of an old school newspaper guy that kind of like, you know, if you can't make |
| 1:15.5 | your deadlines, this ain't the business for you, kid. Or my reporting partner there, Selina Roberts, |
| 1:20.1 | who famously filed a story about a Knicks playoff win within minutes of the final buzzer, and it was |
| 1:25.6 | so good that it gets taught in journalism classes. |
| 1:28.5 | For most of us, though, deadlines can really be fear-inducing. |
| 1:32.6 | And yet, we know we need them. |
| 1:34.5 | But if we don't use them wisely, deadlines can be useless, or even worse, they can be counterproductive. |
| 1:40.3 | Our listener this week has the best of intentions when she sets deadlines, but she just can't seem to follow through. |
| 1:45.8 | Meet Avalon. |
| 1:47.3 | I'm kind of a classic millennial where I've had to do a lot of different things to make money. |
| 1:52.7 | So, you know, I have a background in the restaurant industry of like 17 years, but I'm also a DJ and I'm a digital illustrator. |
| 1:59.4 | And at any given time, there may be a lot of different income streams that I have going on where I'm making money. |
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