In the spirit of last week’s post on systems vs goals, here’s James Clear suggesting that it’s better to have a schedule than a deadline (emphasis his):
[T]here is one common mistake we often make when it comes to setting goals. … The problem is this: we set a deadline, but not a schedule.
We focus on the end goal that we want to achieve and the deadline we want to do it by. We say things like, “I want to lose 20 pounds by the summer” or “I want to add 50 pounds to my bench press in the next 12 weeks.” …
Instead of giving yourself a deadline to accomplish a particular goal and then feeling like a failure if you don’t achieve it, you should choose a goal that is important to you and then set a schedule to work towards it consistently. That might not sound like a big shift, but it is. …
Productive and successful people practice the things that are important to them on a consistent basis. … The strange thing is that for top performers, it’s not about the performance, it’s about the continual practice. The focus is on doing the action, not on achieving X goal by a certain date.
The schedule is your friend.
Read more here.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
So in line with what I’ve been thinking of recently.
A lot of our deadlines are externally imposed, such as those for work. And for a long time, I admired and tried to emulate the organized and goal-oriented people who would break things down into sub-tasks with sub-deadlines. But the sub-deadlines have always seemed just to stress me out even more. Like a long sequence of looming impossibilities.
I’ve found that if I can somehow fixate less on the sub-deadlines and tell myself to work on X subtask for Y amount of time, things get easier. And possibly more productive.
The ‘plan for success’ camp like to say that work expands to fill the time allotted to it, and so goal-setting obviates dawdling. But for those of us prone to hyperventilating over deadlines and/or beating ourselves up over not meeting them, committing to processes rather than milestones probably is the way to go.