Grace Period

Some thoughts on leeway, flexibility, and asking for extensions

This week’s Friday post is a little shorter than usual. It’s inspired by one of the suggestions I made in this week’s edition of ‘Chapter 1’—namely, that we should go ahead and ask for leeway, flexibility, and extensions when we need them.

I think this is something we don’t talk or think about often enough.

Deadline dread

Perhaps the first thing that I should say is that I am all in favor of deadlines. I’m a big fan: they help forced me to put an end date on when I will work on a particular piece of writing a research, they help me maintain a manageable schedule (sort of), and they help me manage other people, too. It’s always good to know when you can expect a piece of writing to be submitted for you to edit, or to know when you have to get something off your desk so you can move on to all the other things you have to do.

That said, did you know that the term ‘deadline’ originally referred to ‘a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot’??

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even if we now use ‘deadline’ to refer to a limit that incurs much less fatal consequences when it’s crossed, the word can still obscure the human factor in our work—that is, the fact that writers, editors, teachers, students, and everyone else in the worlds of research and writing are, well, human. And you know what? We’re human, too.

Asking for grace

As you know, I’m someone who believes in the power of words to change one’s perspective. And if ‘deadline’ is a word that inspires dread whenever you think of it, I’d like to put another word in front of you: grace.

Grace is a concept I’d like to think about a lot more deeply someday. It’s something that’s been snagged in my brain for awhile—not because of a church service or anything like that, but because of a line from Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale: ‘Is ther no grace? Is ther no remedye?’ (line 236).

I’ve written about this in chapter four of my book Practising shame: it’s a moment when a daughter desperately asks her father whether there is any way for her to avoid dishonour apart from the death he proposes to inflict on her.

Pretty grim stuff.

But that reference to grace is what really tugs at my heart. In Middle English, it refers to a mercy, a kindness, a reprieve (among other things). The OED tells me that this meaning has since become archaic (dammit!), though it can still be glimpsed in the term ‘grace period’, listed a little further down the page for the online entry for ‘grace’: ‘an allowance of time before an action is taken or a sanction imposed’. If that isn’t a form of mercy, a kind of reprieve, I don’t know what is.

A remedy of sorts

There will be times when we underestimate the amount of time a piece of work will take.

There will be times when life just happens, as it tends to do.

There will be times when we remember another commitment we overlooked and we have to reshuffle our work.

I guess all I’m saying is: we all need a bit of grace at times. And to get that grace, sometimes we have to ask for it.

In the days since I first posted about extensions earlier this week, I asked for wiggle room twice: once on a big project (the ‘LFB’, for those of you who follow me on Twitter), and once on something smaller with a faster turnaround time. Both times I got a positive response. In one instance I actually managed to turn things around right away (a pleasant surprise), which meant I didn’t need the extension anyway!

I plan on continuing to stick to deadlines whenever I can, but I’m also going to try look for opportunities to extend a bit of grace to others, and to ask for a bit of grace when I need it. I encourage you to do the same.

Have a beautiful weekend!