There’s a word that elicits feelings of anxiety from many adults. Our dislike for the word is cultivated in secondary and tertiary education as we start to grapple with being responsible for output from a certain date. By the time we step into the working world, we have been fully traumatised by the word. And just when you thought you were safe in a common place, it gets worse. The world of full-blown adult life galvanises our dislike for deadlines. What if I told you that deadlines weren’t bad things and could be used to boost your productivity? Here’s how;
Deadlines
The word deadline traces its origins back to 1864 in the American Civil War. It was a line established around prisons, which was essentially a maximum perimeter prisoner would not be allowed to cross. Going over the line would result in death and thus it became known as the deadline. The word was then repurposed in the 1920s by journalists who used the term deadline to refer to a time when news needed to be in before it becomes dead. Remember these guys were working with printing presses that worked overnight so all stories had to be written, edited, proofed and typeset overnight. The word today is fully accepted to mean the time by which something must be done. It’s commonplace in various working environments to have deadlines built into work and tasks. Sometimes the deadlines are clearly expressed and sometimes they are implied. As we learn to run and grow businesses we start to realise that deadlines may not be bad things. Deadlines are a productivity tool. When we move from being handed deadlines to setting deadlines we start to see how they help us be more productive.
Work to completion
The first thing deadlines help us with is teaching us to work to completion. A deadline unlike many other productivity methods used by people isn’t about busy, it’s about completion of the work. It won’t keep you occupied with the question of whether or not you worked today but rather how close you are to completing the task. How does this boost your productivity? Well, you can work a million hours on something, I’ll give the example of a song as it’s something that most should be able to grasp. They say it takes roughly one hour of recording per minute of music to make a song. So a 4-minute song will take 4 hours to record. That’s just recording and we haven’t added things like songwriting, musical arrangement, mixing and mastering. So you could reasonably put 20 hours into a 4-minute song but it will still be enjoyed or disregarded in 4 minutes. That’s not to say you shouldn’t put more time into your work, but just to say the work will not count if the song is not completed.
Parkinson’s law
I recently wrote about Parkinson’s law and how we can fight it. Concerning time Parkinsons law tells us that work will expand to fill the amount of time allocated to it. Thinking about work with implied deadlines or deadlines that far off we can see Parkinson’s law at play. Academic assignments are a good example of this. Assuming 16-week semester students are given their assignment guidelines and questions usually around week 2 and expected to hand in the completed assignments in week 10 or 12. Let’s take week 12 and you will see that students have 12 weeks to complete the assignment. The way many students work the assignment is completed in the last week. Many start it in the same week. I think it’s reasonable to say the assignment takes 1 to 2 weeks to complete if you want to do well. Of course, the assignment came with a deadline but it’s quite far off. Imposing a deadline on yourself early on helps to get the work done before it’s needed. I recall students succeeding by doing this and using the additional time to review and perfect their assignments.
Self-imposed deadlines
The trouble with adult life and the business world is that implied deadlines are inherent in everything. If you have read the discussion on Quadrant 2 management you will agree that many things, especially those that are important tend to eventually become urgent. Registering your business formally will not seem urgent until you are on the verge of signing a deal that will change your business life and all they require is your company documentation. Giving yourself a deadline to do this would’ve saved you the trouble of trying to get it all done in a blaze of glory at the last minute.
Instead of taking deadlines as bitter medicine consider them as a tool to boost productivity. Use them to get ahead of things and to focus on the completion of work rather than being busy.
