"I love deadlines," said Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. "I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Here's a mental trick for thinking of long-term deadlines, based on minor spoilers for the horror film It Follows.

The last time you had a major project to tackle, you set a deadline for yourself -- and then came very close to blowing right through it. The result: You hastily finished (or pulled an all-nighter), and then swore you'd never repeat that experience.

As you surely know by now, August 9 is Census night in Australia. If you're going to be away tomorrow, have an unexpected internet outage or simply don't have time to fill out the form, DON't PANIC: the ABS is giving all Australians an unofficial deadline of September 23 to complete the survey.

Most of the best artists and productive people you know have one thing in common: For them, "I'll get to it later" wasn't acceptable. If you want to create, do it with a sense of urgency.

Video: Waiting until the last minute can actually do a number on your body. If you have a paper, presentation or something else due soon, the normal response is to procrastinate. It may feel gratifying, but all that stress and tension has serious effects on your health.

Time is something we all wish we had more of, but it's unfortunately a finite resource. Whether you're trying to be less flaky, or you can't seem to ever be on time for anything, it can help to remember that time is valuable for everyone.

Getting things done is challenging, but that doesn't mean it's an impossible goal. Follow these 10 tips to unleash your inner productivity ninja.

#NaNoWriMo. A simple-sounding challenge: write a brand-new novel of at least 50,000 words during the month of November. For three years in a row, I started a NaNoWriMo novel but failed to finish it. This year was different. Here's how I finally succeeded.

We're obsessed with planning when we'll get work done. But when we need to knuckle down and put our plans into action, we push tasks back further and further, up until the last minute -- or worse, past the established deadline.

Most of us hate deadlines, but they're part of life. If your deadlines are whooshing by, adding a unique colour cues you in that the deadline is creeping up.

It happens to the best of us -- maybe accounting didn't get you the numbers on time. Maybe the design work you thought would take you four hours is taking more like 14. Maybe Taco Tuesday turned into Food Poisoning Tuesday, and you know you won't make your deadline.

Like many of us, Jessica Hische has too much to do and it creeps into her downtime. So she came up with a productivity trick that ensures she gets the rest she needs. She stopped scheduling deadlines on Mondays, and uses it only for administrative work.

Deadlines are an integral part of life and getting things done. That said, The Wall Street Journal points out that the closer we get to a deadline, the more likely we are to make a bad decision.

"When you finish a project with an unrealistic deadline, your reward is another project with another unrealistic deadline." Meridian Health Plan CIO Tom Lauzon made that observation at the Progress Exchange conference I attended last week, and it's definitely worth bearing in mind.

No human on earth escapes the plague of procrastination. We're all wired to put things off, but we also have the capacity to override that tendency. This weekend, pick one of the many ways to purge yourself of procrastination and start getting things done.

Nobody likes a deadline, but they're a necessary evil for getting things done. As Mythbusters host Adam Savage points out in a column for Wired, a deadline is often the absolute most important tool available to you.

The graph above shows the number of proposals for talks submitted for Linux.conf.au graphed against the deadline for submissions. This reaffirms what we've long known: if you set a deadline, most people won't do anything about it until the last possible minute.

No matter how much time you spend planning a project, it's inevitable that you'll run into a problem outside of your control. Productivity blog Unclutterer recommends you set up a contingency plan for botched workdays or missed deadlines.

We receive so much email everyday that emails usually don't feel urgent, and instead come packaged with the idea the recipient can reply whenever he/she has a chance. If you're looking for a quick turnaround, productivity blog Stepcase Lifehack recommends you start with a deadline.