Meet Your Maker or: How I learned to Stop Making Excuses and Started Making Deadlines
I’ve been developing a music video with my friend Esther and today I got this text message from her:
Let me tell you why I live for deadlines...
1. See the Man Behind the Curtain
They take your ambitions and goals off their pedestal. Deadlines say “This thing is achievable, the problems before it can be solved, and so there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t have it done by this date.” Deadlines demystify your goals. Setting them means you’ve acknowledged the attainability of the things you set out to do.
Let me put it this way: You don’t attempt impossible things, you attempt difficult things.
The time frame you give yourself is based on your assessment of your abilities and resources. There’s a right way to set deadlines, and there’s a wrong way. Your method for establishing time frames must cater to you, so the better you know yourself, the more effective your deadlines become.
The right way to set a deadline is to estimate as accurately as possible the amount of time it would take to complete something, and then slightly shorten that time frame. Giving yourself slightly less time than you would prefer is an effective strategy, because it creates an invaluable state of mind: urgency.
2. Smarter-Harder Hours > Longer Hours
Deadlines invoke urgency, which puts you under pressure. Using pressure in the right way can enhance your performance.
Dr. Kelly McGonigal, author of The Upside of Stress:
“When you have a challenge response, the brain and body actually sift into a state that gives you more access to your resources. You know your heart might still be pounding, but your blood vessels are going to relax and open up so you get more blood flow to your muscles and to your brain. Your brain shifts into a state — it’s actually better at paying attention to everything in your environment rather than sort of being laser-focused like you might be in a fight-or-flight response on what’s going wrong or what’s dangerous. When you have a challenge response, all of your senses open to all the information that’s available to you, which means that you’re basically smarter under stress.”
Operating at 75% will render the quality of your accomplishments 75% of what they could be, no matter how long you take. You may as well put yourself in a position of operating at 100%, and get that 100% level of quality in your accomplishments. So not only are you doing things quicker, you’re doing them better.
3. Resource Snowball Effect
I don’t want to work with people who don’t get things done. Finding good collaborators is a tricky game, and can end up wasting a lot of your time. We all hit our slumps, and productivity can’t always be at 100%, so feeling someone out takes time. You have to see how high their highs are, and how low their lows are. One of the worst things is when you totally click with someone, but somewhere down the road you find out they’re not too keen on putting in the work. This will most likely happened to you if it hasn’t already. Be prepared, because not everyone has the same priorities as you.
There’s a cool trick to finding good collaborators, which is looking back on their body of work. If they have a few completed pieces of work spread out over some years, forget them, move on. If their body of work is too big for you to even skim through one afternoon, you may have a keeper on your hands.
Now look at the appeal of someone prolific from the other side:
So you’re hitting your deadlines, you’re getting things done. This makes an impression on the people around you, especially your potential collaborators. People want to work with people who make things happen and get things done. People want to give their resources to people who will make proper use of those resources. This doesn’t mean you’ll have a crack team knocking at your door, or billionaire angel investor calling you up just because you’ve finished something. But in some form or another, doors will open.
As you and your work get better, so do your options. This is the crazy snowball effect of getting things done; each accomplishment is a hook cast into your lake of resources.
To clarify some misunderstandings about deadlines...
Deadlines are not the end. If you don’t have the desired outcome by the deadline you’ve given yourself, it’s up to you to decide where you go from there. Do you move on to the next step and finesse later? Maybe this aspect isn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things, and what you have will do. If it really is very pressing to correct or finish, deadlines can always be extended. They are not dogma, they are tools to organize your efforts.
Deadlines do not compromise quality-- people do. Like I said before, when you reach a deadline with undesirable results, the next course of action is up to you. You don’t have to settle on anything, you may just need to set a new deadline.
Not everything needs a deadline (or at least not conscious ones). You don’t need to set a deadline for the next time you take a piss, but your bladder will certainly let you know when an extension is no longer an option. Deadlines are tools. Very useful ones. Learn how and when to use them and you will undoubtedly see positive results in whatever you’re doing. You may want to start now if you haven’t already, because there’s one huge deadline coming for ya: the deadest of deady-dead deadlines: your death.
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