Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps.
There are a number of possible reasons for these findings, including contextual factors specific to summer activities (i.e., distant deadlines requiring students to self-regulate their learning patterns).
The reason is that one of the major players in the enterprise, Florida's politically connected sugar cane industry, wants to postpone into the distant future the deadline for cleaning up the polluted water flowing into the Everglades.
When deadlines are distant, managers can shift people's attention away from the deadline and toward the final outcomes of everyday tasks.
Indeed, for the majority of football fans, Deadline Day is a distant phenomenon.
United States and East European officials had urged Germany to extend the deadline so former laborers living in distant regions would have time to complete their paperwork.
What if you're due to begin talks with someone in a distant city or country, or under a tight deadline to hammer out a deal?
Their deadline is 2019 – a date so distant as to be irrelevant to their careers; a gap so long as to allow lobbyists to chip away until the proposal becomes both unrecognisable and ineffective.
Suddenly, for some, the fund's December 2003 deadline for filing a claim does not seem that distant.
Just when the Cavs believed things were coming together, the huge deal at the deadline caused more adjustment time, and they finished a distant fourth in the Eastern Conference.
So I missed the deadline, and relegated the idea of Singularity University to a distant, fuzzy future that I would somehow stumble into but certainly not proactively create.
