A hard deadline which absolutely, positively, must be met or the world will end. Or not. Whatever.
"In other news, another Greek deadline for resolving their fiscal crisis has come and gone. Finance ministers are now saying that the REAL deadline for resolving this crisis is in two weeks."
A deadlinejunkie is a person who can only function, or make progres when the deadline is close.
this mostly contains weeks of pushing work in front and then a couple of nights long hard work, while being stressed out about it.
A random deadline to complete a task, which has no real world consequences. For example, your office sets Monday as the deadline on all canned food donations for charity , but the box just sits there until Friday, which is the actual day they planned on taking it to the food bank.
"Hey bro, did you get your weekly report done for the big boss? He needs it today!"
"Naaah, it's only Wednesday. Wednesday's an artificial deadline, because he doesn't even send those reports to corporate for another week."
Designates the approximate point in time at which work begins in earnest; employee motivation is frequently observed to be "dead" before the deadline draws near.
"Christ, it's the nearly deadline already?! Hey Pete, put down the controller my friend - it's time that we looked at these shuttle schematics."