Treated seriously it’s amazing how well a deadline can focus our creativity.

The songwriting friends who I’ve met up with, for well over a decade now, sometimes set a deadline of one hour in which we have to try and write a song. We sometime add a further constraint such as a fixed title.

One time I misheard the title we were supposed to be writing to. I thought it was “Better Late Than Never” but with 15 minutes to go I discovered it was actually supposed to be “Left It Too Late”.

So I had to ditch the first attempt (which I remember being happy about, because it was rubbish) and starting from scratch. And, just on time, I had a short punky blast of a thing which, if nothing else, I was happy to sing to my mates as “a song”.

When we’re recording to my monthly deadline , the last session, and sometime the last hour of the last session, are often the point where something that wasn’t working somehow comes together.

Who knows why it works like that, but a self imposed deadline is a really excellent tool to get the creative juices flowing with anything we’re trying to make.