[ Deadlines ]

An 8-year-old asked me, “what’s a deadline?”. Oh, the innocence of not knowing what a deadline is.

The origin of the word is from the mid-1800s, being an actual line around a prison that if a prisoner crossed it, well, that’s the deadline. I didn’t tell the 8-year-old that definition.

I wonder when it became a business term, now being a key tool used to motivate us to accomplish something by a certain date.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “I love the whooshing sound deadlines make as they go past”. Fortunately, in this context, no one dies when they whoosh past.