Our Gemara on Amud Beis discusses one of the Rabbis’ interesting practices regarding mitzvos whose deadline was the end of the night. The Paschal offering must be consumed by midnight, though technically it can be eaten all night (according to Rabbi Akiva). Similarly, Berachos (2a) explains that one has the entire evening to recite Shema, but the Rabbis required it by midnight. The reason offered is that by making an earlier deadline, a person is less likely to delay, fall asleep, or forget.

Logic operates one way, and “psycho-logic” another. Logically, giving people more time to accomplish a mitzvah should increase observance, not decrease it. Yet, human nature works differently: the more time we have, the more comfortable we feel to postpone, and we often slip into a momentum of avoidance and non-action. On the other hand, if we have a shorter timeframe—which raises the pressure—it becomes harder to avoid, and we enter behaviors of immediacy and accomplishment. In this case, less is truly more.

It is a painful but universal truth that scarcity tends to develop appreciation. The less time we have, the more we accomplish; the more time we have, the greater the tendency to accomplish less. The brevity of life is painful, yet it is our very fragility and mortality that elicit appreciation and enjoyment in life. The Gemara (Sotah 46b) tells an aggadah about a legendary city called Luz where the angel of death had no jurisdiction. Yet it was observed that when an elder eventually grew disgusted with life, he would commit passive suicide by walking outside the gates and letting the angel of death reach him. The longer they lived, the more bored they became.

I don’t believe that this discussion about deadlines and procrastination finds itself on the first page of the Talmud by accident. The rabbis were winking at the student who had just begun his journey in Shas: “Don’t think you have all the time in the world. Don’t procrastinate—start working on your studies right now.”