If working to the last minute genuinely works for you, we’re not going to tell you to stop. Plenty of people produce their best work under pressure. The question worth asking isn’t whether it works. It’s what it costs.
Because the stressful part usually isn’t the sprint at the end. It’s everything before it. All those weeks where you’re not working but you’re thinking about it, and feeling guilty that you’re not doing what you should be. That’s not rest. It’s low-grade dread with a deadline attached.
Then comes the boom. Lots and lots and lots, all at once. Which takes enough out of you that you need to recover, and that recovery eats into the time you’d have used to start earlier next time. The cycle feeds itself.
Why knowing the pattern doesn’t break it
Here’s the genuinely annoying part. Understanding this cycle perfectly doesn’t stop you going round it again. The urgency is activating in a way that steady, early work often isn’t, and if the work itself doesn’t hold your interest without that pressure, the deadline becomes the thing supplying the motivation. We wrote in more detail about the deadline burnout pattern that keeps academics stuck, and the shape of it is the same whatever the deadline is.
So rather than asking how to become someone who starts early, a more useful question is what this is costing your body and your recovery, and whether that’s a price you want to keep paying. If starting earlier feels impossible in practice, the issue is often less about time management and more about how you get going at all, which is something we’ve looked at in how to overcome procrastination.
If this pattern sounds familiar, it’s the kind of thing we work through with clients in coaching.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
