What finally broke years of procrastination loose.
Earning my doctorate in educational leadership was one of the most grueling seasons I have faced in recent memory. The research, the writing, the endless citation checks, some days felt like they might genuinely be the end of me, not dramatically, just in the slow, grinding way exhaustion accumulates when you cannot see the finish line clearly enough to pace yourself toward it.
Illness and family emergencies since the pandemic had already delayed my timeline more than once. Some of that delay was unavoidable. Some of it was not. Some of it was plain overwhelm and procrastination, the kind that convinces you there is always tomorrow to finally sit down and finish the chapter, the kind that feels like rest in the moment and reveals itself as avoidance only in hindsight.
I want to describe what procrastination actually looked like during that season, because it did not look like laziness from the outside, or even from the inside most days. It looked like reorganizing my research folder instead of writing. It looked like reading one more source before I felt ready to draft the section that source was supposed to support. It looked like telling myself I worked better under pressure, a story I had been telling myself for years, conveniently excusing every deadline I let slide closer without meaningful progress behind it.
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Then came the deadline that finally could not be negotiated with. If I did not complete the program by April 2024, I would be dismissed. All the years, the tuition, the mental effort, gone for nothing, no extension available, no more room for the kind of delay I had quietly been allowing myself for years.
That deadline is what finally shook me out of the mental fog I had been living in. I want to be honest that it was not discipline that saved me in the end. It was fear of losing everything I had already invested, which turned out to be a far more motivating force than any productivity system I had tried up to that point. I had read books on discipline. I had built schedules I never followed. None of it moved me the way genuine, specific fear of loss finally did.
I will never forget April 8, 2024. I was waiting to hear from my dissertation chair about whether my final manuscript had been approved, and I was moments away from stepping outside to watch the once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse everyone had been talking about for weeks. I remember the strange, split attention of that morning, half of me watching the clock for an email, half of me half-listening to neighbors outside already setting up chairs in their driveways for the eclipse.
The email arrived first. Approved. I could schedule my defense.
I scheduled it for that same day, about five hours later. I do not fully know where the composure came from to defend a dissertation on five hours' notice after years of delay, except that once the wall finally broke, everything I had been avoiding turned out to be far more ready than I believed. I remember sitting down for that defense still faintly disbelieving that it was actually happening, that the years of circling had genuinely arrived at an ending.
The defense went well. I am now Dr. Rhonda L. Simmons, and I remember sitting there afterward, stunned, relieved, and a little amused that the universe had scheduled my breakthrough and a celestial event on the very same afternoon, as if even the sky had decided to mark the occasion in its own dramatic way.
I think about that season often now, particularly the years of delay that preceded the five hours of sudden, decisive action. It would be easy to tell the story as though the delay did not matter, since it all worked out in the end. I do not think that is the honest lesson. The delay cost me real time, real peace, real years of carrying an unfinished thing that quietly weighed on me every day it remained unfinished. The ending being good does not erase what the middle actually cost.
Here is what I want to say to the leader who has been circling something for longer than she wants to admit, telling herself she needs more time, more readiness, one more round of revisions before she can finally finish. Sometimes the work was never actually the obstacle. The obstacle was the absence of a deadline you could not talk your way around. If you cannot find that deadline externally, it may be time to set one you refuse to break yourself, before circumstance sets one for you on far less forgiving terms.
I have thought since about how many other unfinished things in my life have quietly outlived their original deadline, sustained not by genuine obstacles but by the simple absence of a consequence severe enough to finally force the issue. It is an uncomfortable thing to admit about yourself, that a project could sit stalled for years not because it was too hard, but because nothing was urgent enough to make you finish it. I do not think that makes me unusual. I think it makes me honest about a pattern most capable people quietly share and rarely examine closely.
Since that April, I have started deliberately building consequences into projects that matter to me, artificial deadlines with real costs attached if I miss them, because I no longer trust myself to finish purely on the strength of good intentions. That may sound like a small, almost clinical adjustment. It has changed more about how I actually get things done than any amount of motivation or inspiration ever did on its own.
I still think about the neighbors setting up chairs for the eclipse that morning, unaware of the entirely different kind of light breaking through my inbox at the same time. There is something almost comic, in hindsight, about a celestial event and a dissertation approval arriving within the same five-hour window, as though the timing itself was trying to make a point I was too relieved in the moment to fully register. I register it now. Some finish lines arrive quietly. Mine arrived with the whole sky performing alongside it.
I keep a photo from that defense on my desk now, not as a trophy exactly, more as a reminder of how close the version of me who nearly did not finish came to never getting to take it. I do not look at it as often as I probably should. When I do, it recalibrates something in me quickly, a fast, clarifying reminder of exactly how much a real deadline can accomplish once every softer form of motivation has already been tried and quietly failed.
-- Dr. Rhonda
The Next Step: If you have been circling something unfinished for longer than you want to admit, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to help you name what is actually stalling the finish, so you can set a deadline before circumstance sets one for you.
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