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Deadlines as Technology

• maartenh 3y ago
  For me, deadlines work best if more people than me have a stake in the thing I'm working on.
  • sandbags 3y ago
    Same. As Douglas Adam’s said “I love deadlines. I love thé whooshing sound they make as they go by” but if a deadline involves other people those consequences get me to care.
• adrianmsmith 3y ago
  I think one fundamental thing I've learnt about management is that different people need different things. 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.
  • nickdandakis 3y ago
    This is the best take, IMO. 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
    • plutonorm 3y ago
      If you are going to do this it's best to advertise that fact in your job ads. You want people who like to operate in that atmosphere in return for something - promotion, perk or vision. Otherwise you just get high churn rate and poor productivity.
• james-bcn 3y ago
  Great piece. I'm also one of those people who reads lots of productivity books, and tries out lots of tools. But I've come to realise the key to productivity is fairly simple - make sure you're really enjoying what you do. Then you'll get up in the morning and want to do it. You'll be able to focus. You won't get distracted by Twitter or whatever. But giving yourself deadlines is a great way to combat perfectionism. You can be very focused, but if you're being too much of a perfectionist you're not being as productive as you could be.
  • albert_e 3y ago
    This sounds like good advice -- but I am also trying to figure out why I still procrastinate hopelessly on projects that I do enjoy. Is it merely that I want/enjoy the "result" (feeling of accomplishment) more than the "process"? Namely I have just become lazy?. Or is some undiagnosed ADHD tripping me up at every step I take. I intend to meet a therapist soon and hope to find out. 40s is late but better than never I guess. Grew up in a country where mental health doesnt get any air time in daily life. Still figuring out whom to approach and how.
    • james-bcn 3y ago
      Ha well I'm 53 and I'm still trying to get better... There is a guy who presents on LinkedIn learning called Dave Crenshaw. He has a lot of good techniques and claims he developed them to conquer his ADHD.
      • albert_e 3y ago
        Thanks. Luckily I have LinkedIn Learning through my employer subscription. Found his time management courses, bookmarked, and started one.
    • mklepaczewski 3y ago
      Words like "intend" and "soon" are your enemies. How about you do it right now? At least set a deadline in your calendar to do it. However, chances are it won't have the desired effect. One great method of dealing with a task is to delegate it to another person. Maybe ask someone to remind you that you need to see a therapist?
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  That aside, Microsoft TODO which I think is based off wunderlist IIRC is fantastic. It has the features you need to manage a complex todo list but not an iota more and the iOS app is snappy. You can store your deadlines in there. Having a todo with sub steps, deadline and planned date is great.
• kqr 3y ago
  I agree but also I don't. Deadlines, and their close cousin goals, are but an excuse to stop working. 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. ---- 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. ---- 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. ---- 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.
  • jaggederest 3y ago
    The alternative to deadlines is consistency. Do something every day, mark it off on the calendar, if you do it for 6 to 12 weeks, it's a permanent habit, move on to the next habit you want to form.
    • kqr 3y ago
      Isn't that just a recurring deadline at midnight? You still have that binary nature, except on a smaller scale. 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.
      • 3y ago
• jasode 3y ago
  >But before you do, set a deadline. That’s the one piece of “technology” that’ll really help you ship. It’s a wonderful constraint. 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.
  • maroonblazer 3y ago
    There's a related piece of advice that goes something like: "Make your goals public, this way you're accountable to others who've heard you make a commitment to yourself and will be interested to see whether you achieve it." 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.
  • deprecative 3y ago
    Hell, even work deadlines don't work for me because I know they're made up and irrelevant. The only thing missing it is going to do is throw off someone else's bonus. Meeting it probably means I worked for free at some point as a salaried employee.
• jimbokun 3y ago
  I think this is what drives some of the motivation for Agile-ish scheduling strategies. 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.
  • kqr 3y ago
    I think this is a common but ultimately incorrect interpretation of scrum, which leads to unnecessary pressure, stress, and corner-cutting. Standup is for coordination and sprints are to avoid committing too much time before validating. But if thinking of it as deadlines helps you, all the more power to you!
    • jimbokun 3y ago
      Low stakes deadlines, in my mind.
• cracrecry 3y ago
  it depends on the your personality and your job. 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.
• daneel_w 3y ago
  Surely the author meant TECHNIQUE, not "technology"? 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.
• revskill 3y ago
  Proscatination is the real issue, not deadlines. 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.
  • gukov 3y ago
    Procrastination happens when people are not excited about completing a task. A deadline is a way of introducing excitement. Procrastination can be defined as “delaying working on a task until the impeding doom of the deadline grows too large.”
    • mklepaczewski 3y ago
      Procrastination may happen for dozens of reasons, emotions are are just part of it. Many people are excited about their projects and goals, yet they procrastinate on them (I'm one of those people).
• pitched 3y ago
  Deadlines are a tool to increase stress. Some people respond to that stress by focusing on the work so deadlines are a very important tool for them. For everyone though, constant and persistent stress in not healthy long-term. Use it carefully, responsibly and in moderation!
• behnamoh 3y ago
  I think the main problem I've faced is NOT KNOWING how much time to allocate for different tasks. 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.
• haolez 3y ago
  "Deadlines are huge, but really what are deadlines? They’re opportunities to fail. That’s all they are. They’re actually opportunities to learn, to fail. Hopefully not fail catastrophically, but it’s an incredible data gathering moment." Brilliant. Will use this argument with my team. I'm not even joking :)
  • convolvatron 3y ago
    the thing that frustrates me about deadlines in many software organizations is that management seems intent on letting them slide by without comment. thus throwing away any opportunity think or talk about how well we are functioning as an organization, or even how well we are doing at setting schedules.
• blablablerg 3y ago
  He writes about all these productivity tools and that he stopped using them. For me the same, but the one I still use and helps me is org mode. It excels at customizability and simplicity. How I use it: I write down my plan for the day, and I clock in and clock out, keep track on how much time I spend on actual work and doing useless stuff (like browsing the internet). When I saw how much time of the day you are actually doing nothing during time you have decided for your self to be productive, well that was a shock.
• svilen_dobrev 3y ago
  is it same Paul Ford as in this piece? www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/
• Forge36 3y ago
  Deadlines always annoyed me. I suspect a large part of it is "what does it mean to miss a deadline?" 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.
• tells 3y ago
  managing emotions is at the crux of all of this. those productivity apps try to remove the emotion from certain decisions and give you some organizational help so you can act procedurally throughout your day. giving yourself a deadline is another approach coming that tries to focus the emotions you already feel into a productive force. a deadline will provide clarity because your subconscious will try to prioritize it over the small details that those productivity apps will have you continuously document, which can be a pain and sometimes create more friction when you're stuck with zero momentum. 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.
• nicbou 3y ago
  I disagree. There are some tools that really help by taking friction out of the way. A well-tuned text editor and a few good bash aliases can keep you focused on your task. Good tools are digital mise en place [1]. 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. 1. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/mise-en-place https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/mise-en-place
• tpoacher 3y ago
  There are two kinds of deadlines: yours, and someone else's. The two could not be more different.