For people in my line of business, working on deadline is a way of life.
Plenty of people have time-specific goals to achieve, of course, but journalists and editors seem to exercise special ownership of the concept, expecting that when they talk about being "on deadline" people they encounter will somehow understand the particular urgency of the situation and will be willing to rearrange their calendars to fit in a last-minute interview, say, or postpone their own urgent dealings to give the publication's timeliness a priority.

I try to act casual about it, of course, but it is absolutely true that for me editorial deadlines are deeply serious - sacred, almost. Sacrosanct. Inviolable. You don't ever miss one. Ever. The stories must be completed, the art collected, the issue laid out and proofed and the print date honored, come hell or high water.

So I was dumbfounded this past year when a writer sent me a regretful e-mail
only a couple of days before his story was due stating that, owing to a death in his family, he was bailing on the assignment. Perhaps dumbfounded is too flimsy a term. I was non-plussed. Then irate. Then frantic, as I wondered how, at this late moment, I was going to fill the hole this insult to the journalistic code left in the issue.

Needless to say - but at the time it seemed miraculously - we in very short order were able to find another way to approach the topic, perhaps a way that was even considerably fresher. My nervous system got more of a workout than I would have hoped for in pulling the new piece off, but I have to confess that the results were very satisfactory.

I say this now, in part, to force myself to admit publically that good things can come out of unmet deadlines, though I shudder as I form the words (I'm writing on deadline, of course, so I'm understandably on edge). But I also wish to offer my belated apology to the errant writer at the center of my tale. He missed his deadline because life - in the form of death - had intervened.

Time is not, as we in the journalism trade so easily suppose, absolute.
Or sacrosanct. But most of us in this culture mourn its passage, denounce its wasting, fear its finalities - and feel prevented from allowing life to intervene on its demanding schedule because we accept that "time is money."

The commodification of time is a sad inheritance from the industrial revolution, I'd guess. But our modern, post-modern or extra-modern lives seem to take it for granted. My time is valuable, we all say, but we know bone-deep that our time is beyond price. Few deathbed reflections involve the wish that more time had been spent on the job.

Unless, of course, the work is vocation.
And the time-consuming demands of it contain satisfaction when met. Satisfactions of the most basic kind - ones that nurture self-respect, the common good, creativity. Work that is worthy requires time carefully spent and justly compensated - but, also, freedom from time spent working. This is a critical freedom, in fact, one necessary for recalling our relationship to the larger life and to give us a chance to reflect on where we and our communities are headed and whether the course we've set needs adjusting.

More and more, I'm glad to say, people at every point of the economic spectrum seem to be challenging the time-is-money mantra of this culture. The assault comes from an infinite variety of venues - from living-wage campaigns, simple-living experiments, the re-invigorating of hand craftsmanship and right-livelihood business enterprises.

And, painfully enough for people like me, it must also come from questioning the tyranny of deadlines.

Julie A. Wortman is publisher and co-editor of The Witness, <julie@thewitness.org>.
Photo: 'Imagined Dolphins', Jackie Beckett

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