I think this article misses the mark about deadlines. The main problem with deadlines isn't that they're "poorly applied". It's that typically they reflect oth

I think this article misses the mark about deadlines. The main problem with deadlines isn't that they're "poorly applied". It's that typically they reflect other people's priorities, which don't align with yours. If the deadlines completely match your most efficient prioritisation scheme, then they will work, but you don't need the deadlines in the first place (unless you're lazy, but this is not what we're talking about; when we talk about Parkinson's law and inefficiencies we assume good-will from the outset). As soon as you introduce a deadline, you're basically introducing a change in the distribution of your work, which may lessen one particular item of work, but overall increases the Shannon entropy of your work distribution. Consider the following. You have guests arriving in 1 hour. You need to clean (45 minutes) and cook (15 minutes preparation time, and 45 minutes roasting in the oven). If left to your own devices, you'll start with food preparation, and then use the baking time to clean. Bang, you've made the deadline. The problem comes when your wife demands the house be cleaned first. Congrats. You've just made your guests wait 45 minutes for food. Most externally imposed deadlines have the same effect. They ensure the 'cleaning' is done way faster, and completely disregard the spillover this causes. Typically because they may not even care about the other tasks in the first place; except in the sense that they care about the next deadline they set to you getting missed because you were dealing with previous spillover (which they don't care about). Paradoxically, this makes people set stricter and stricter deadlines, in order to get people to work "faster". Which of course only causes more spillover and makes things grind to a halt instead.