Deadlines are Dangerous
by James
If you have a deadline, you’re in one of two situations. Either you’ve decided for yourself when a piece of work will be finished, and formalised that prediction, or you’ve been set a finish date by someone else. Either the deadline is your own, or it isn’t.
Deadlines you set for yourself aren’t deadlines: you can change them any time you want. An extra day, and extra week — who cares, aside from you?
External deadlines are the real thing though, and they’re bad news. As soon as you’re in a situation where you need a deadline, you’re loosing touch with the reality of your work: things have ceased to be about quality, and suddenly it’s all about time.
This is bad because under deadlines, quality of work usually suffers. Deadlines are usually unrealistic in relation to what needs to be done; they focus instead on when things need to be done by. Of course, when you’re concentrating on how long something takes, instead of how well it’s done, mistakes are more likely to happen. (No, you can’t focus on both at once.)
Deadlines says more about how much of a rush you’re in than they do about how well you can work. If you want to pick an end date for a project, let that date evolve naturally from the way you work: pick a date that realistically represents how long it will take you to do a good job, not a deadline that’s imposed because of some arbitrary “must be done by” requirement.
External deadlines (eg given by clients) can be subdivided further in the same way: external or self-set. Say you need to launch a course site for a university: that has to be delivered before the courses start, or the system will, in the worst case, have no value that academic year. If the system is non inherently time-dependent, then the issue is simply how soon you can start delivering value.
If the external deadline is real, all you can do is reduce scope to deliver the maximum value in the time available, but you still risk failure. If the external deadline is artificial, there’s dysfunctional management higher up. There’s existing research that people perform better under self-set deadlines[1], even if they are not optimal at choosing those deadlines[2]. The higher up these deadlines come, the more I suspect distrust, command-and-control attitudes or cost-based accounting is at work.
I agree with “pick a date that realistically represents how long it will take you to do a good job” – but if you miss more than half of self-set deadlines, there’s cause for an urgent retrospective.
[1] http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a785856889&db=all
[2] http://tastyresearch.com/2006/12/26/the-effectiveness-of-self-imposed-deadlines-on-procrastination/