Maybe it's "Authored" vs. "Emergent"

[Tanarii]

Yes. If you're going to use time pressure, you need to actually be keeping track of time, which very few GMs seem to want to do anymore. Keeping track of the passage of time was an important point of advice in 1e DMG from Gygax.
You need to track the days, the hours, that pass in-game. Decide when the ritual will happen on the in-world calendar, give the players sufficient warning, so if they hustle and sacrifice they can get there early enough to prevent it.

Worth noting, Gygax wasn't worried about tracking time so much because of time pressure on PCs. He was worried about it because he had an Open table, with multiple PCs per player and they could bring whichever characters they wanted to the table. So it is important to know if a character was on an expedition to somewhere (follow up session next Saturday!) if a mid-week impromptu dungeon crawl came up. Because that specific character couldn't be involved.

Keeping strict track of campaign time just has the added benefit that time is a resource. In fact, it's pretty much the main resource, to which most of the others become tied.