The reason that deadline actually can work very well for you is what it forces you to do is make decisions.
There are no interruptions, only mismanaged inputs
There's a lot of reasons why deadline-driven may actually - it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just all it does is it speeds up and makes you a little proactive about decision making.
You can do anything, not everything
The ancestor of every action is a thought. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you’re at zero backlog, it’s a whole lot easier to change priorities.