Deadlines are something that everybody cannot escape from. As students, we encounter it often in school as we are given numerous deadlines for our homework. For working adults, they also encounter deadlines in their work. For example, a proposal deadline or maybe a sales quota they have to reach by the end of the month. As the senior citizens have also been students or working adults in the past they would have also encountered deadlines. That is why i say everybody cannot escape from deadlines in life. If you think about it, life itself is also a deadline. It just does not tell us when the deadline is. For every deadline given to us, there is always a reason behind it. Teachers need time to mark our work, companies need to submit the proposal to another company. If we ignore our deadlines, and hand in our homework or proposals let's say 3 months late, i do not think the teacher would bother to mark it nor would the other company accept the proposal as they would have already chosen another company for that job. Many people do not realise the importance of deadlines, they hand in their work, proposals, reports late a day or two and their superior or teacher lets them slide by. Thus, they think they can keep getting away with it but there will always be a time when the assignment is big enough, important enough that even if a person was a minute late, their teacher or superior would not accept it because whatever needed to be done would already have been done. It could result in a person losing their job or a student going to a class he/she does not want to be in because they did not hand in the proper forms on time. It would only be then that they realise the importance of a deadline but by it would already have been too late. I think that most people will only realise the importance of deadlines when they fail to meet the deadline and are punished for it, motivating them to not fail to meet the deadline as they do not want to face the consequences again. I feel that whatever deadlines that teachers give to students in school, those deadlines are to prepare students for when they are working adults where there are more than just a few deadlines that they cannot hand in at their own leisure. If we do not realise the importance of deadlines early in life, sooner or later we will, but the price we pay would be higher than just a punishment from teachers.

Samantha Goh. (28)