The importance of having a deadline
Similar to the main subject of one of my previous articles, just the mere mention of the word “deadline” sends cold chills down most of our backs. Why might that be? Why do we give so much power to that word? Most of the topics explored in this article are from my point-of-view as a software developer, but much of it can be applied to other industries and day to day activities.
In this article, I’ll try to avoid the topic of mismanaged time and the proper ways to determine a task’s completion time as much as possible. These subjects fall outside the scope of this article and can be written about in length all by themselves.
The power of a deadline
So, what gives a deadline the power it has over our lives? Why does that term come with so much weight and is almost never pleasantly received by us?
It’s safe to say that we have been presented with some tasks with targeted deadlines at some point in our lives. Can you remember the first deadline you’ve ever received? Was it at your first internship job when you were assigned a task by your superior? Or was it in high school when your whole class had a written assignment that needed to be turned in by the end of the semester? Perhaps it was even earlier than that, when we were just children playing in the playground and our parents rigorously told us to “be home by 8 PM” or when to finish brushing our teeth and get ready for bed? The truth is that we were attached to some form of a deadline from our earliest ages. Could you recall what it must have felt then, being told to accomplish something by a specific point in the future? That feeling was most likely some form of fear or anxiety. Fear of making our parents upset. Fear of getting a bad grade. Fear of losing our jobs. The last one perhaps resonating quite loud in our adulthood.
So, from the earliest point of time in our lives we associate deadlines with something bad happening, perhaps to us or someone close to us. Something that carries the weight of consequence. No wonder why we shroud when we hear that word. We immediately associate it with something negative happening. From the point of receiving a deadline we tend to focus on the negative consequence of not meeting it. But what about the positive things about it? What happens when we meet the deadline?
Well, in that case there’s usually some kind of reward waiting for us. Maybe it’s the reward of having healthy teeth because we rigorously brushed them or a good grade or a promotion. If that’s the case, why don’t we associate a deadline with a positive outcome? Maybe because the number of negative outcomes outweigh the positive ones. That could be very well be true. On one hand we have the negative outcome of not meeting a deadline with the potential of being demoted or even losing a job with the positive outcome being a new task and new deadline or a pat on the shoulder for doing a good job. Yes, in this proposed scenario the consequence for missing a deadline is quite disproportionate to the sight of meeting it. Like a well-oiled machine, with time its expected from us to deliver as much as possible tasks with little to none missed deadlines in order for the machine to keep going. Failed tasks make the machine screech to a halt and depending on the size of the machine (e.g.,the budget for a project ) it can have severe consequences not just for us but our colleagues and even the whole company that we work for. So, the negative outlook to the term is now a bit more justified?
No, not exactly. In the extreme example mentioned above the idea that one person alone has the impact on the whole company is a bit exaggerated. I’m not saying that it’s not possible. Over the time we have witnessed that the decisions made by individuals have severe impact on countless other people, but the idea that an ordinary employee has that much power is less likely. Companies nowadays have redundancies in place that prevent that kind of thing of happening. Yes, missing a deadline can lead to a hiccup, but the machine continues to work as expected. What about outside the scope of company employment? What about our personal lives? On the other hand, a deadline is not exclusively attached to our jobs.
The same can be said in the case of our personal lives. We are expected to complete our day-to-day tasks and if those are not met in a predefined time, then we are presented with some kind of consequence the severity of which can range from something minuscule like missing an episode of our favorite TV show to something more important like missing a date with our loved ones. And this is true for all types of deadlines (yes, there are multiple types). Don’t think that self-imposed deadlines have less impact on our lives. Missing a few of them can lead to losing the confidence in ourselves when we assign new tasks. Deep down we have the small ball of doubt that keeps growing with each deadline we miss.
Could it be that we involuntarily give a lot of power to deadlines? We are feeding them with our angst, our lack of commitment or even the most heinous lie we keep telling ourselves:” I’ll do it tomorrow.” How can we improve in this particular area?
The key for building ourselves up might be in the way of how we approach new tasks and deadlines. Instead of looking at them as something standing over our shoulder, we can look at it as something that is very much finite. Something that has an expiry date attached to it. It might not sound very rewarding, but it can very well be. Can we, at least, agree that the proposal of something being finite seems much better than something lurking about without the prospect of ever leaving? Something that you deep down know has to be done, but with no deadline attached it will always hang around us for days, months or even years. The thoughts of: “I should do that…at some point of time.” or “I should get around to doing that pesky task…”. seem a bit too open-ended to be something definitive. Imagine saying those lines to someone else. They almost feel like lies. If we reword those lines into something more deterministic like: “I’ll have up until next Friday to finish this.” and “This task has to be done today.”, we knowingly assign timed values to those tasks. We have already dedicated part of our time to execute them. In some sense, we made an investment into something and it’s almost always only up to us to cash in on that investment. If we don’t do the tasks, our investment is gone and it’s not coming back. The only way to “fix” it is to make a new investment in it, but now our new investment comes with the label and burden of the previous failure (or multiple failures if we continuously prolong any completion). Doesn’t seem too fair on the new tasks now, does it?
There are certainly a lot of ways around this, the most pervasive one is to stop lying to ourselves. If we constantly defer finishing a task, deep down we know that a new deadline on a stale task wont make it fresh. When recognizing if that might be the case, taking a few steps back and analyzing the task itself can lead to its final completeness. Evaluate and re-evaluate. Maybe after so many prolongations, there’s no point in doing a task anymore or maybe some external factor is blocking the execution. At the end, it’s only up to ourselves if we are going to address it or not. It’s our time that we invest.
The illusion of not having a deadline
Imagine this: you wake up in the morning, it’s Friday and the sun is shining bright through your window. You have breakfast and get ready for work. Weightlessly, you go to work. The long, dreary trip to work, today, seems unusually short when you arrive at your work place. You sit down at your work desk and just start working on your planned tasks. But there’s something different than all the previous work days. All the tasks for today have no deadlines attached on them. Today, no one’s looking over our shoulders and checking their watch in a nervous manner.
I believe that we would lie to ourselves if we wouldn’t feel a bit more relaxed when there are no angry clock eyes on us all the time. So many things that we do in our lives have some sort of a slowly closing gate that separates us from our goals. A good gauge of the closing gates speed and if we can make it in time to cross it, can lead to us eventually crossing that gateway or to sit back and watch it slowly being shot close before our eyes.
What we usually don’t understand is that not having an initial deadline for a task, that doesn’t mean that one will not materialize itself at some point in the future. If (usually its more “when”) that happens, it puts us in a very uncomfortable position and something that initially was something minor or seemed as unimportant in the sense of priority of execution, turns into a monster waiting for the opportunity to jump and attacks us. Every task grows over time, weather we like to admit it or not.
Tasks are created and assigned for a very good reason. Not having a tight deadline or having one that, to us at least, seems very far of, doesn’t mean that the given task does not need to be completed. Rare are the cases that long prolonged tasks and those of lower priority are, in the end, shelved or even cancelled. As developers we should approach every task with the same goal in mind. When we sit down to work on a task, we should also aim to complete that task in a “reasonable” amount of time. A deadline should only exist as a marker that, if reached without completing the task, reminds us that something went very wrong and that we lost the window of chance to actually have some kind of input in the tasks execution. In many cases the task will be resigned to some other person, but there will always be the mark that something wasn’t completed in time.
Like I’ve previously mentioned, by assigning a deadline to a task we make a sort of commitment and investment in actually seeing it through. We can all agree that checking out a task from our task sheet feels good? Certainly feels better than constantly opening up a task sheet and day after day seeing the same task(s) aimlessly sitting there with no special time assignments to it. It has a two-fold meaning. One: the task is not important enough to have any urgency about it; and two: the task doesn’t feel personal. The first one is pretty much self-explanatory, but the second one requires a bit of explanation. Every task that is assigned to us has to feel somewhat personal in order for us, as the task’s executors, to register it. It can have our name attached to it, but that doesn’t make it personal. What are the benefits to completing it? What are the consequences for not doing it ever? Indeterminate tasks can’t have any of those things, because of their open-ended nature. As such we don’t feel connected to them and see them more as some notes left at our desk for the person in the previous shift (if that’s the kind of job) or topics for discussion because, at the end, it somehow has our name attached on it. An example of a non-personal task can be: ”Learn to play piano”. To whom is this task meant for? By when should that person learn to play the piano? Today (not likely), next month, next year, by the end of the decade? By comparison: “Learn to play the piano in a year”. OK, now we can work with that. It’s not ideal, but at least we have a point on the horizon we can aim for.
Even if you work as a freelancer or have your own company or projects, its a good thing to have some concrete deadlines for all of the tasks you need to complete. By doing so you’re developing a habit and the highly important discipline that can elevate your professional career.
Unrealistic deadlines
An unrealistic deadline is any deadline that doesn’t take in account the time available of the person doing the actual work. You can have 10 tasks with seemingly realistic deadlines, but if all 10 of them are assigned to a person or team that has already too many tasks on their hands, the new deadlines jump from being realistic to being something in the realm of fantasy. The same goes for the tasks in our personal lives. If we already have a whole queue of tasks waiting for us for today, adding new tasks will most certainly make the previous task feel more cramped. What can we do to avoid those scenarios?
Your work discipline and objective self reflection, play one of the most important roles here. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that our manager, client or whoever presents us with a seemingly impossible deadline for a task. How many times have we heard the dreaded sequence of words: “It must be done by insert arbitrary short time-span”? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And how many times did you counter that sequence of words with mentioning how the proposed time-span falls outside any realistic scope of the projected time for completing the said task? As professionals, it’s not unreasonable to presume that we should have some input about any proposed deadlines. We should be presented with all the information needed in order for the seemingly tight deadline to be justified in our and the minds of our colleagues (if we work in a team environment). If no additional information is provided to us, it’s up to us to ask for more information. Without additional information we might not know that the proposed deadline is defined by some other, external event. Perhaps there’s a fashion show scheduled and the promotion for it must start at the same time the deadline expires. Maybe some big sporting event, like the championship finals, are just around the corner and it’s crucial for a console game to be shipped to promote itself and that event. Simply put, there are things that are outside our or the management’s control and as that they come with some predefined timetables that may or may not be compatible with our internally projected task deadlines. But we can’t know about those things if we first don’t ask. Be sure to gather as much information as possible in order to calculate and present a more realistic estimate for the task completion. Perhaps some information was miscommunicated and, in actuality, there is room for some time extension or perhaps the tasks priorities have been changed and now you do have some additional time. If not, we can always calculate our own time estimates.
The more your own time estimate differs from the one given by the manager, the more it points to potential problems and it should be dealt with as soon as possible in order to obtain more realistic expectations about the task completion time. Present your concerns and be sure that you have gone through all the projections in order to back up your own time estimates with the necessary data to convince those with the power to change deadlines to actually change them. Going in front of your higher ups without any convincing data that backups about your unrealistic deadline claims, can be looked at as amateurish and it can propose a concern for your task completion estimation skills.
In the same vein, we should be careful when we assign tasks to ourselves. We can be great work managers, but lousy managers of our personal time. This is when our ego comes out. We like to think that we can accomplish so much during the day, which can very well be possible, but, in general, we don’t put so much effort in time-estimation for the tasks we give ourselves. We would start the day off with one list of tasks and the day with an unrecognizable list at the end of it. What we can do is to consider taking a few moments to think about a task and its relationship to other tasks on our to-do lists before actually adding to it. How compatible that task is to other tasks. What I mean about this is that some task simply don’t “work” together. Going to the end of the city to buy some item that realistically will take around 2h of our time is not compatible with sitting home and cooking dinner. Buying an item takes around 10 min. in the grocery store, but the mere trip to the store and back takes a lot more, so somewhere that time has to cut-in.
There shouldn’t be such a thing as an important task (not to be confused with task priority). Every single task carries the weight of time it takes us to complete it. It wont magically disappear, no matter what we tell ourselves. The lower priority tasks will be shuffled at the end of the queue with respect to their deadlines.
Stretching and elastic deadlines
Parkinson’s law states as follows: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
The idea of the ever-postponing task as a realistic option in any kind line of work can be like a mosquito that buzzes around our heads in a warm summer afternoon. We shake our heads and swing with our arms to make the mosquito go away, but after a short absence, the mosquito comes back and continues with the aggravating buzzing. Its only when we decide that we had enough and focus on the nuisance that is the mosquito, that we are actually making some progress in dealing with the problem.
Postponing tasks only leads to them being grouped together with new tasks and cut into their respective deadlines. What we now have are some sort of task vampires that, not only crave for their own execution times, they actively bite into the time needed for another task’s execution. Instead of a task living in its own little time bubble, we have the situation of multiple tasks sharing the same bubble. At some point that bubble has to burst and we don’t want that to happen.
“What about multitasking?” — you might ask. I’ve read somewhere about a comedic definition for multitasking: “Multitasking — the ability to do multiple things at once, badly”. This is not at all the case for most of us. We do multiple things at once almost all the time. The thing that is important is to distinguish heavy, important tasks from those that we do almost automatically. Not every task demands the same amount of our concentration. Doing multiple smaller, less thought provoking tasks at once, is very much feasible to most of us, but doing more engaging tasks goes in counter-productivity. There’s only so much of us available to effectively execute anything. Perhaps we sometimes overestimate our abilities and what we end up doing at the end is just making a mess of everything with no task being executed in its fullest.
In the case of one of my own personal projects, I had a list of tasks with assigned deadlines for each one. One after another, I’ve completed most of the tasks well inside the proposed deadlines, but there was one task that I’ve prolonged for so long that almost unknowingly it missed its initial deadline. Since I was the only developer on that project, I simply assigned a new deadline for that task and continued the work on other tasks. Once again, the problematic task has reached the deadline marker with no sight of its completion. A deadline renewal was in order, but I didn’ t do that. No more time reassignments for that task. What I did is to re-evaluate the task’s importance in the project and the priority for it. Obviously something was problematic with that task from the beginning that made it so difficult to be executed. After analyzing the task again, I came to the conclusion that that task was too complex by nature. Not difficult in the sense of the problem it tries to resolve in the project, but by the mere heavy lifting it tries to do by itself. Instead of the task being easy to understand and very contained, it depended on so many other things to be done beforehand in the preparation steps that in order for the task to be marked as “complete”, basically the whole project needed to be complete. This wasn’t an issue with the initial time estimates and priority, this was an issue with the tasks definition. From the begging that task shouldn’t have existed. It should’ve been split into several smaller tasks that could be more easily integrated in the projects development lifecycle. After completing the re-evaluation process, new tasks were created the development workflow continued.
This can frequently happen with difficult tasks. And don’t make a mistake, the task is difficult since it takes so long to complete. No matter how simplistic a task is, every time we don’t complete it in time, by default, it makes it a difficult task. It might not started its life as a difficult task, but we let it become one by not addressing it in time. If a task or multiple tasks start being renewed after reaching their deadlines, we should look at their definitions in more detail. Splitting a larger task into multiple smaller ones, could be a much better way with putting us a bit closer to finishing it. This can most definitely be applied to so many things in our lives. In general, we should aim to complete as many tasks today in order for tomorrow to have room for other things.
Task priority
So many times, in agile development we come across tasks that are constantly being re-evaluated and their priority re-assigned. A number of tasks that seemed important at the start of project turn out to be not important at the end. Some even being discarded without a single minute of actual development time dedicated to them. This is more common when working on large projects. A lot of times our ideas and thoughts about a project tend to be different at the start then those at the end of a projects development. This is simply because we didn’t have the same information at the start that we have at the end of a project. Some unforeseen circumstances such as external influences (client change requests, industry changes, personal life, etc.), make it almost impossible to have a 100% oversight of a project from beginning to the end. The waters are somewhat murky at the beginning, but we don’t see them as such because we are focused on the horizon instead. Don’t get me wrong, there are absolutely projects that have stuck with their initial plans and projected timetables from start to finish, but a lot of them don’t have that privilege.
A task’s priority is determined from its relationship between other tasks, their overall contribution to reaching a certain goal and, of course, a deadline. A task that is crucial to the further progress of a project with a tight deadline is most certainly going to be looked at as a high-priority task.
It should be noted that a task’s priority is not fixed in place, but it can change over time. A task that starts out as low-priority can become high-priority just because it’s deadline is close to being reached.
Mark it on the calendar
This might sound not so important, the simple event of marking a task in the calendar, but can have a lot of benefits. If the calendar is placed somewhere noticeable in our environment, maybe as an app (on our phones, laptops and computers) or physical calendar on our desk, just by glancing at it can remind us of some of the responsibilities that we have to do.
Day to day we are juggling a lot of things in our heads. It’s a busy traffic there all time and it’s quite unreasonable for anyone to expect that we don’t forget about things from time to time. It’s pure human nature. We, by default, prioritize and shuffle things to remember all the time and as result of all that shuffling about, some things get to be misplaced. New information comes pouring into our lives and its hard to filter everything and avoid the information clutter that inevitably will arise. What can we do to avoid this? The simplest thing is to just write everything down.
The unceremonious event of just writing something down, elevates that subject from the ground level and the rest of the information flood. That elevation might not be much, but at least we have dedicated a little bit more of our time, effort and promised to ourselves that something should not be ignored or forgotten about in the near future. This might sound a bit “old fashioned” to the younger readers out there, but studies have shown that writing something down, the physical act of using pen and paper and not just typing it in a note taking app, could result in a bit more insurance that something will more likely be committed to our long term memory. In addition to the last statement, something should also be said about writing everything in our own words and understanding. Like in how we would explain a topic to some other person. It might be easier for us to understand something in our own words and thoughts than someone else’s. I realize that this might fall outside the subject of this article, but I just felt that some readers would be upset if I wouldn’t mention this.
When giving tasks their deadlines it is important to not forget to give them a little bit of “room to breathe”. Grouping multiple heavy tasks with their deadlines lining up right after one another can result in concentration overlaps. An example of this would be something like finishing up an important 3h meeting and following that with a 3h task and then a 2h mentoring session. This might fit in the 8-hour workday. It looks very “doable”, sure, but what we fail to realize is that the meeting might have been very exhausting and it takes us around half an hour just to get on the right concentration level for the next 3h task, but at that point we might be very well behind schedule and start to pick up pace to finish the task. Let’s say that we managed to complete the task on time and we jump in the mentoring session. At this point we are even more exhausted than we were after the meeting. Needles to say that it now takes us a bit of time to concentrate on mentoring. And it goes like that on and on. Giving a bit of time to prepare for a task can be helpful in rising our focus and concentration levels a bit. This also goes for any “success rush” we might have after we’ve achieved something important.
Today we have powerful tools that help us manage our tasks and even visualize a task and its priority for even more clarification. Seeing a task marked red for a day can immediately tell us that that task needs to be dealt with asap.
Putting a calendar somewhere where we can see it easier, helps us to better remember that there are still some unfinished tasks left to do. This can also put a lot of pressure on us if we have a lot on our shoulders.
Outro
Deadlines help us in reaching our goals by forcing us to think about the tasks. If a task is reached in the set amount of time, great, but if not, we now have to reevaluate everything around that task. It’s very easy to assign a deadline to a task when creating one and we can easily fall in the trap of assigning arbitrary values for it that can come out of nowhere and cause potential panic. Taking a bit of time and looking at the overall picture where the task fits in, can save a lot of potential frustration later on.
The simple truth is that we don’t hate deadlines, just unrealistic ones.
What are your thoughts on deadlines? Do you have a habit of assigning deadlines on your personal projects too? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you for reading.