Here’s a famous quote from Douglas Adams…

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

I love deadlines too. But not for the reason he did. Deadlines are, in my view, one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal, provided you use them wisely and don’t kid yourself you’re making progress when you’re not.

In part this is down to my background. I left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter for a tiny evening newspaper in the north of England, now long vanished. After working for a variety of regional daily newspapers I wound up on the staff of The Times at the age of 25. All daily newspapers. Back in the days of print. When deadlines meant something.

Why? Physics. In order for your story to get into that evening or morning’s newspaper you had to deliver on time for it to be edited, set, laid out in the page, then printed. Miss the deadline and you miss the edition. Do that on a regular basis and your boss is not going to be amused. I worked on both sides of newspaper publishing, as writer and as editor. And I can tell you that as an editor I had no respect for people who couldn’t meet a deadline. They made my life hell because I always had to keep something in reserve in case they didn’t deliver. It was just unprofessional, and the speed of daily newspaper journalism has no place for unprofessionalism.

But the book world — and the magazine world and weekly newspapers often too — take a more relaxed approach to deadlines. Often you will be quoted one that is pitched too early in the belief you’re bound to deliver late. I first discovered this when I moved to the Sunday Times where the fact I always delivered at least on time and usually early was regarded as a little weird.

So when you sign a publishing contract and it says you must hand in a finished draft by a certain date stick to it, even if your editor is quietly thinking you’ll miss it. Professionalism again.

But here’s the more important side of deadlines for me… the ones you set yourself.

I always do this so I can keep track of how a project is coming along as I write. Scrivener and Ulysses both have formidable tools to help with this. You tell them how long you think your manuscript will be and when you want it finished. They then calculate how many words you need to write each day to hit that target.

In Scrivener it looks like this.

You set it up through these options where you say how many days a week you want to write. For me it’s always Monday to Friday.

So, to hit this deadline, I need to write 1450 words each week day. If I continue to write more than that, the target will fall. Less and it will go up. I can see the progress or lack of it as the story builds.

Ulysses does much the same thing though in a rather more cryptic way. You can find the instructions here. It’s a shame there isn’t a simple keyboard shortcut to take you through all this stuff — instead you have to do a bit of clicking with the mouse. But it works.

Do I need to deliver the work on this date? No. I always set a deadline before I actually need it. That’s an added incentive. It also means if there’s a bit of slippage I’ve room to make it right.

I don’t always work to a deadline, but if a target date exists, and it does in this case, I think it’s worthwhile. Since the day I first hit a typewriter aged 17, I’ve learned to hate the sound of those deadlines whooshing by.