Deadlines, my favorite drug

I love being on a tight deadline. It's like a drug, and it delivers this rush to my body that can last for hours. I feel hyper and slightly chaotic. A crash usually follows if I don't have another deadline pulling at me.

Fellow journalists might think I'm obnoxious for loving deadlines. But there's nothing better. The pressure. The inability to procrastinate.

Bad things can happen when we don't have a tight deadline, or at least a slightly vague one. We lose the intensity to do our jobs well.

Today I covered an event all day; I started at 8:30 and took a cab back to work in the late afternoon. I started to write around 4:30, and I could have taken my time and filed around 6 p.m. But I usually want re-writing time, or at least a few minutes to make paragraphs sparkle and find the perfect verb between editing.

The forum I covered was probably not the most important one I will ever cover, but it was about crime (and I always dream about being a crime reporter, at least for a few years). It gave me the same rush I get from all stories when I'm on deadline.

Between 4:30 and 7 p.m. I was chatting non-stop with my co-workers, ultra hyper and literally bouncing from my chair due from the high. To some I might have been annoying, but a dear pal in the newsroom called me refreshing.

I hope when I'm 50, still a journalist I'm sure, that deadlines continue to be the drug everyone needs once in a while.