Where does time pressure, and in particular, deadline pressure come from? If we know this, we will probably have some good ideas about how to deal with the pressure.
Common responses to the question "Where does the pressure come from?" are: "My boss gave me too much to do!" Or "I don't have enough time to do this in addition to the other stuff I have to get done!" Or "There's not enough time!" We often seem to point at these external causes for the pressure.
Our culture teaches that the source of pressure is external: that time pressure, like the flow of time, is somehow built into reality, or built into deadlines themselves. Time pressure is a fact of life that we simply need to adapt to. There's something objectively 'real' about deadline pressure.
But we can ask, "Is it true that deadlines always cause pressure? Or is there some other factor at work?" We can look at our personal experience for answers to these questions.
In my own experience there were lots of times when I felt pressured under a deadline and was eventually able to turn the whole thing around, changing what I was doing into an enjoyable, not-very-stressful situation, and sometimes going even farther, so that what I was doing became thoroughly enjoyable, what is sometimes called a peak experience.
Have you had similar experiences? Take a couple of minutes to recall whether you've had deadline situations where at first you felt considerable pressure (and may even have disliked what you were doing), but after a while things changed somehow so that there was little or no pressure as you worked.
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If you can recall situations like this from your work life, this seems to indicate that the pressure really isn't built into the deadline; it isn't just an objective reality. (If deadlines always caused pressure, we'd never be able to come up with an example of a deadline where we changed the pressure.) It seems that there's something 'subjective' we sometimes do to change the experience. There's some other way to relate to the deadline that reduces the pressure we feel.
The Relation Between Pressure and Involvement
Perhaps we could say that the pressure we feel somehow depends on our perspective, on how much we're involved in what we're doing. Let's take a little closer look at the importance of involvement.
We have different verbs to indicate the degree to which we're involved in what we're doing. In order of increasing involvement, I can:
- hold back
- resign myself to doing a job
- get into it
- be involved
- be absorbed or engrossed or preoccupied
At some point in my work I might be 'holding back', which means I have something to do, but for the most part, I'm just resisting it. Perhaps I think about it, but then quickly put it out of my mind. If I get a little more involved, I'll 'resign myself to' doing the job. Basically that seems to mean that I'm not just putting it out of my mind any longer. With a bit more involvement, I 'get into' the job. A bit more involvement, and it's common to say 'I'm involved'. A bit more, and I might say that I'm preoccupied, absorbed, or engrossed.
(In general, the word involved literally means 'turned into'. So we could say that one's involvement is measured by the extent to which one's self is 'turned into' the work, or the degree to which one is merged or identified with the work.)
Now we can ask, "How does this changing involvement relate to the feeling of pressure?" Take a couple of minutes and ask yourself: If you consider your past experiences of working under pressure, when you got more involved, what happened to the pressure?
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Based on responses I've gathered to the preceding question, and quite a bit of other research, the best answer to this question seems to be the following principle, which I now use as a working hypothesis: The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing.
The situation seems similar to what happens when you put your index fingers into the ends of a Chinese finger puzzle (a five-inch-long, woven hollow tube). If you try to quickly pull your fingers out, then there's some pressure, and the puzzle turns into a trap. But if you simply relax, and simply get into the puzzle, moving your fingers closer together (getting more involved), there's no pressure, and the trap opens up. The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing.
There's an old American adage: "A watched pot never boils." This seems to mean that if you're anxiously waiting for something to happen (you may be waiting for water to boil, or for a stoplight to turn from red to green), time actually seems to perversely slow down. When we take a position apart from what's happening, it seems to affect the way time is experienced. If this is true, it lends more support to my working hypothesis: The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing.
Whatever formula may be accurate, time pressure depends primarily on our perspective, on the way we relate to the deadline. No matter what external causes we can identify for pressure--e.g., who gave us our tasks, how much we have on our 'plates' of things to do, and how 'little time' we seem to have to finish things--once we take on a job, I believe that the pressure we feel is largely under our control. Even if you don't believe this, or aren't sure about it, wouldn't it be a useful working hypothesis to test out, to challenge yourself with?
Two Factors in Our Perspective
We can take our analysis a step farther. If pressure depends on our perspective, can this 'point-of-view' be broken down into different factors? I have identified two factors:
1. The primary factor is our feeling of time passing (FTP), our ordinary feeling of time flowing in the background of whatever we're doing. This common feeling of time passing is what sets us up for, or predisposes us toward, occasionally feeling deadline pressures, or severe time pressure.
This FTP results from resisting past experiences that we didn't like. Repressed negative feelings are transformed into our sense of time flowing. (For more on this, see How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.)
Most people assume that FTP can't be changed (our culture teaches that it's built into 'reality itself'). However, I think that we can dismantle our FTP, and by so doing, actually prevent severe time pressures from ever getting set up.
2. The other factor in our perspective is closely related: Various situational feelings that we don't want to feel--like fear, guilt, sadness, confusion, or embarassment--can add energy to the situation, intensifying the 'normal' and often somewhat constant pressure of time flowing. For example, we may feel guilty for not taking care of our part of a team project. As another example--and this happens quite often--we may be confused because we haven't done conventional time management practices to identify our values and goals and plan and organize our activities.
Deadline pressure feels like a trap we're stuck in. Our ordinary feeling of time passing sets the trap; situational feelings of any kind can spring the trap, causing it to close in on us.
Summary
In summary then, time pressure often seems to result from external causes--from having too much work assigned by a supervisor, or from some 'real' lack of clock time, or from the relentless objective flow of time itself. However, a great deal of evidence shows that time pressures depend primarily on our perspective or world-view. The important factors in our world-view are our feeling of time passing (FTP) and situational feelings (including our attitude and confusion about values and goals) that intensify the 'normal' pressure of our FTP.
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