Deadlines as Technology
blog.jim-nielsen.com
blog.jim-nielsen.com
You either hit the deadline well in advance, in which case you can sit on your hands and still consider it a victory. Or you miss the deadline and you have failed and might as well give up. Or -- the worst case -- you can tell far in advance that you will miss so you don't even bother.
Compounding the problem is that we often aren't even in full control of what can make or break the deadline, so it becomes a lottery that, whatever the outcome, awards us with an excuse to stop working.
It's valuable to know the cost of time, though. There ought to be better technologies for this than deadlines.
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I've tried to think of ways to quantify this but not arrived at anything useful. The best method I know is to explain to an expert that "I didn't ship today because the product is still missing X which is necessary for the customer because Y", and then the expert can tell you off if you're wrong.
In fact, you might get far even when striking out the expert. An "I didn't ship today because" journal might be useful on its own.
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In contrast to other comments here, I don't think this is really about people needing different sorts of motivation, but more about excplicating the cost structure of the trade-off people make when they trade time (delay shipping) for... something else. This is a hidden cost which I believe frequently is larger than people think.
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And of course, time itself is an abstraction here for the benefits one get from shipping earlier, like faster feedback, less variability in release size, etc.
I think you're onto something, though: in order to get an effect, we need to drill down to the daily, ongoing practises. We can't do it at a zoomed out, results-level view.
That's a much more useful perspective than "it doesn't matter if it's done and suddenly on this day it becomes super important" which is what a deadline implies to me. (For concrete examples of this binary type of deadline, think of releasing something at a conference, or handing in an essay in school.)
> You either hit the deadline well in advance, in which case you can sit on your hands and still consider it a victory.
Why would you sit on your hands? You feel tremendously satisfied that something was easier than expected, and look forward to moving onto the next thing earlier than expected.
> Or you miss the deadline and you have failed and might as well give up.
No, it's not failure at all. A thousand times no. You just realize you were too optimistic with your deadline, and you set a new one based on your new knowledge. Why would you give up?
> Or -- the worst case -- you can tell far in advance that you will miss so you don't even bother.
Again, just set a new deadline! Except in this case it might be too far out and you already discovered you were bad at estimating it, so break the task into a few chunks and just set a deadline for the first one.
At the end of the day, deadlines as motivation do work for some people, because instead of a task feeling scarily too-big that you don't know when you'll ever finish it, it encourages you to break it down, and compare your progress each day with what you expected to get done, because you now have a measurement stick. It turns things from unmanageable/scary/anxious into manageable/"I can do this"/confident. And you can (and should) reset the deadline if/when you learn that the task is much larger than expected.
The point isn't to meet the deadline or else you're a human failure, a million times no. It's just a tool to set a realistic goal and measure progress against something.
And realistically, you'll probably only make 50-70% of your internal deadlines like these, and that's the sweet spot. If you're hitting 95% of deadlines, they're too lax/easy to really motivate you. While if you're hitting 5% of them, they're way too strict/optimistic. The point is to be a healthy challenge.
Also to be clear, the article (and my comments) are about internal deadlines for motivation, not external deadlines at work.
According to my dictionary, it's not really a deadline if you can just move it as soon as it seems inconvenient or out of reach.
I think maybe Lucas Costa calls those things preemption points. It's a time decided in advance against which you check your progress and assumptions, but with no connotations that work must be complete by that point, which is strongly implied calling it a deadline.
Self-imposed deadlines as a mental hack can work for some people.
For some others, it doesn't work because their brain knows it's an "artificial deadline" created by their own mind. It's like trying to tickle oneself. The self-imposed deadline just comes and goes.
That said, there's no harm in trying it to see if you're one the ones it does work for.
Of course you have to pick the right people. Just tweeting it (at least if you're me) is the equivalent of telling no one.
I am like the author, a deadline helps me immensely. Yet at a place I worked at recently, there were very lax deadlines, that's because others felt too stressed by a tight deadline.
A good manager can understand who needs what and can set up the appropriate incentives for each team member.
Different strokes for different folks, but frankly managers don't care if a deadline greatly encourages or greatly stresses their ICs. Either way, it's a way to hold people accountable for a deliverable at a certain date, or at the very least an update why it was missed.
Not having deadlines requires much more nuance to ensure a team delivers work consistently, and unfortunately nuance in work management doesn't report well
Next time I look at my HN threads, I should have already set the first appointment.
Chunking tasks and reducing project start time helped.
Like many people say, starting something is half the battle.
For example I am currently postponing for days, a 5 minute phone call that I am supposed to make to a colleague. Not even big stakes -- just a new topic i am supposed to initiate work on. There is a negative outcome possible -- blame on me for slacking -- if I don't do this. Still I am struggling to make myself pickup the phone and make that call.
Rest of my duties as a professional and as a family member seem to be going one fine while this item keeps getting kicked down the road. 2 days and counting. I don't have any clue why.
Sticking to the actual topic, I'm not sure if it's really as good as the author wants to make it sound. Deadlines work great for some people, and for some they're just terrible, sometimes even counterproductive. To me artificial deadlines come off as a not particularly efficient tool.
Oxford Languages: the latest time or date by which something _should_ be completed.
Meriam Webster: a date or time before which something must be done
Those have vastly different implications: If something _must_ be done it implies "missing this has negative consequences" whereas if something _should_ be done: it's possible there are no consequences.
Given that distinction: The author appears to share Oxford's definition. I'd rather differentiate these two definitions with different words "target date" vs "deadline". Missed deadlines are bad. Missed target require re-estimation of new target-dates.
The problem is that these productivity tools can become tools for procrastination. You get to feel productive without actually doing anything. An out-of-control todo list or backlog becomes a wishlist.
Having a todo with sub steps, deadline and planned date is great.
1 week or 2 week sprint creates a deadline. Then you see if you planned too much or too little, and can adjust for the next sprint. And focuses you on just what you should be working on.
Even stand ups are little mini-deadlines. You kind of want to feel like you have something to report the following morning, based on what you said you were going to work on that day.
I find those things help me organize my thoughts and stay focused. And creates shared goals and expectations, and a little bit of social pressure (in a good way).
I understand others don't necessarily find them helpful.
But if thinking of it as deadlines helps you, all the more power to you!
Sure, you can learn from past experience (e.g., "last time I needed to write a report like this, it took me a week"). But that means your brain must keep a memory of events+ellapsed_time, which is something my lazy brain avoids at all costs.
if your life is already moving fast and you are managing a ton of different things, I think those productivity apps will provide a great resource to remind you of other things that need to get done and remove the friction that comes with context switching.
Brilliant. Will use this argument with my team. I'm not even joking :)
People without procastination (or the ones who knows how to resolve procastination) won't need deadlines.
It's not an issue that you have no deadlines but you still do it. It's fine.
But if you delaying action you wanna do, you're missing many chances to fail.
For me, personally, deadlines never worked.
Probably it has something to do that I am somewhat like a rebel, and I oppose firmly any authoritarian order, even if it is my own.
Maybe it is because I have always done innovative work that never repeats itself. We program machines so they are the ones that repeat the work after it is done once. So I can not do what most people do: They know how much time something will take as they have done it a million times before.
Basically the best technology I use for me and my team is habits and knowledge about psychology(thing like anxiety and procrastination). Nothing beats that.
The two could not be more different.
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/