Ass, Meet Gear: The Motivating Power Of Deadlines
Phyllis Korkki writes in The New York Times about the power of a deadline in motivating, quoting Dan Ariely:

People respond well to deadlines because meeting them provides a distinct feeling of having achieved something within a time frame. "It's a good way to keep score," Professor Ariely said.

It is possible to motivate yourself, he said, by announcing a deadline to others -- perhaps on Facebook or on Twitter. Not meeting the deadline would then feel like breaking a promise, he said: "It does say something about your character."

People ask me whether I get "writer's block." Um, no. I just write, even when I feel really stupid and untalented as I type every word. As Susan Shapiro's uncle, Jonathan Fast, told her, "Plumbers don't get plumber's block." (As a writer, same as a plumber, you just need to sit down and get to work.)

For that, I use a timer, and make myself work an hour before I check email, etc. By doing that, I typically get in "flow" -- where you lose yourself in your work -- or I at least set myself up with enough "pre-work" to get myself into a flow state the next day.

Korskki also includes this bit:

THIS column, for example, is nowhere near as good as it was as a vague idea in my mind's eye. There's so much more I wanted to cover, including the etymology of the word "deadline." (O.K., I'll throw it in: It was formerly "a boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without risk of being shot by the guards," according to Dictionary.com.)

I wanted to discuss the link between death and deadlines, and whether death awareness affects people at work, a topic that has been explored by Prof. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

But I ran out of time, and that's the point. This column -- inferior though it is to what I had imagined -- is done, and it's done because I had a deadline.

When I'm in trouble, I triage -- figure out what's most dire and attend to that, and then go back and pretty up the rest if there's time left, assuming I can't get time to stretch like cheap Lycra.