Having a deadline is something that we all generally hate simply because it puts additional pressure on us and that stress is just not a useful way to live. However, do you know where the term itself comes from?
To get the answer, we need to go back in time to the American Civil War. At that point, prisoners would effectively have a line drawn around them in the dirt and if they ventured over that line then they would be executed immediately.
It did not take too long for both the prisoners and their guards to begin to refer to that line in the sand as the deadline since crossing it did, of course, result in you being killed. Clearly, it does not have the same conditions attached to it today as it did back in the Civil War, but it is still capable of giving us some stress especially when we get closer to potentially stepping over that line.