# The deadline > Short fiction. Eleven weeks of not doing a piece of work she was entirely capable of doing, and the crude arrangement that finally got most of it done. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-deadline/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18. I would like to tell you I am too sophisticated for a system this basic. I did more in the next few weeks than I had managed in the previous eleven. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version, including where this approach fails, is at [attitude and motivation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/attitude-and-motivation/). The portfolio is five sections. It is not hard. I am not being modest, it is honestly not hard: it is a description of work I have already done, in a specified format, with evidence attached. Any competent person in my job could write it in about four evenings. I had it open for eleven weeks and produced eleven hundred words, most of which were the contents page. --- I know what the eleven weeks looked like because I could describe it to you in detail, which is its own kind of horror. Sunday afternoon, laptop, folder open, section two on the screen. Read the last paragraph I wrote. Decide the whole approach is wrong. Open a new document to plan the approach. Write four bullet points. Look at the four bullet points. Close both. Every Sunday. For eleven weeks. Then a small tax of shame on the Monday, and the shame did nothing except make the folder slightly harder to open the following weekend, which is how that works and why the people telling you to just get on with it have never had the problem. I tried the ordinary remedies first, in case anybody is wondering whether I went straight to asking a man to spank me about a spreadsheet. I tried a wall planner. I tried telling two colleagues the date out loud so I would be embarrassed. I tried the thing where you promise yourself a weekend away. Every one of them failed inside a fortnight and all for the same reason, which is that the only person enforcing any of it was me, and I am extremely good at giving myself an extension. Gavin watched this happen from the other end of the sofa for most of the summer and said nothing about it, which was correct of him, until I said something about it first. --- What I asked for, in July, at a kitchen table, with a calendar open, was embarrassing to say out loud in a way that surprised me. I have asked this man for a great deal over six years. Asking him to make me do my own paperwork was the most exposing request I have ever made of him, because it is an admission that I cannot make myself do a thing I want to do. We set it out properly, because a vague version would have been useless. Five sections. A date, which was the Sunday before the September submission window. A stated consequence for missing it, agreed in advance and written on the back of an envelope that lived on the fridge where I could see it. Not a surprise, not something invented on the night, and nothing that got worse the more I annoyed him, because he did not have a vote in whether he was annoyed. The envelope had the number on it. That was the whole system. He asked me twice whether I was sure. The second time he asked whether I would rather he just made me sit at the table with him on Sunday evenings, which was a good suggestion and which I turned down for reasons I could not articulate then and can now: I did not want help. I wanted a cost. --- Here is what I did not expect. Almost none of the effect came from the thing itself. It all came from the envelope. Third week of August, a Tuesday, about half past nine. Gavin was out. I was on the sofa with the television on and my laptop shut beside me, and I got up, and I went to the table, and I did an hour and forty minutes on section three. I can trace exactly why, which is the humiliating part. It was not professionalism. It was not pride in my work. It was that I had done the arithmetic about how many Tuesdays were left, in the same part of my brain that does arithmetic about whether there is time to get to the post office, and the arithmetic came back unfavourable. I am forty-three. I have a mortgage and a team of six. What moved me off that sofa was the same mechanism that gets half the country to file its tax return on the thirty-first of January, and I have had to make my peace with that. --- I want to put the limits in, because I gave this a try for one thing and then made the obvious mistake of thinking it was a general tool. It works on tasks. Specifically: tasks I know how to do, that have an end, that I am avoiding for no reason except that they are dull and slightly frightening. It is superb for those. It is the best thing I have ever found for those. It does nothing at all for the things that are actually stuck. There is a decision about my mother that has been sitting there since March, and no consequence anybody could attach to that would help, because the reason I am not doing it is not that I lack motivation. Putting a number on the fridge about my mother would be obscene. I knew that without having to test it, which is something. And I suggested it to Helen, who has been struggling for over a year, and it was a bad suggestion and I should not have made it. She tried a version of it with her husband and what it produced was not work, it was another way of failing, with somebody watching. She was worse for about a month. She was generous about it. I have not offered advice on that subject since. --- On the Sunday I had four sections finished and the fifth about two thirds done. I was not going to pretend otherwise, and I had thought in advance about whether I would, which tells you something about how much I trust myself. I put the laptop on the table, open, at the actual page. He read enough of it to see that four were done. Then he said, "So that is one section," in exactly the voice you would use to say there is one pint left, and took the envelope off the fridge, and did a fifth of what was on it. Not the whole number. A fifth of it, because I had missed a fifth of the work. Which was proportionate, and unarguable, and over in under two minutes, and it is the single most effective thing that has ever happened to me on the subject of paperwork. No lecture. No disappointment. He did not tell me he was proud of the four, either, until later, when it could not be mistaken for a reward. --- The fifth section went in eight days later. The submission was accepted in October. We are doing it again for the next one. The envelope is back on the fridge with a new date on it, and I object to it about twice a week, and I have entirely stopped pretending it does not work. The thing I have not resolved is how I feel about being a person this works on. I would prefer to be moved by the intrinsic satisfaction of professional development. I am not. I am moved by a number written in biro on the back of an envelope from the council, and by knowing that a man I love will read it on a Sunday and do what it says. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Attitude and motivation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/attitude-and-motivation/) - [Accountability and check-ins](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/accountability/) - [Rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/) - [Why structure appeals](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/why-structure-appeals/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.