Deadlines aren’t evil
Telling your brain when to do something can be a great motivator
If you dread deadlines, you might be using them wrong.
That’s not your fault. All we know from a young age is that a deadline is when you turn something in, whether that’s an essay you wrote for homework, your latest assignment for the newspaper or an entire book manuscript. And yes, those deadlines can be daunting. Especially if you’re someone with a brain that doesn’t get motivated until right before deadline, perpetually leaving you without enough time to finish the work.
But deadlines are necessary. They ensure that work gets done in the needed time frame. However, they don’t have to be scary. And you can even use them to your advantage. So here’s four strategies to get deadlines to work for you.
Everything needs a deadline
Yes, I’m ramping it up. Not only are deadlines not evil, you should probably have more of them. That’s because work that doesn’t have a deadline rarely, if ever, will reach the top of your to do list. There will always be something that is more important, more pressing. That something will have a deadline.
Let’s consider a goal for this newsletter: I would like to have a template for newsletter posts. There’s no one telling me that this needs to be done. And if I don’t do it, I can still write posts. They just won’t be as good as they could be; at some point, I’ll forget to include something that I would have put in a template.
But I’m going to put a deadline on this: end of July. That will give me time to get more familiar with the Substack platform and do some research on best practices. (More on breaking up a project below.) And yes, I can ignore the deadline if work gets to be too much or I just decide to go lie on a beach. But the deadline is an intention that I will do this thing.
Deadlines are even more important when asking someone else to do something. Without a deadline, they don’t know how to prioritize the work. So if you want them to do the thing, a deadline can give it a ranking.
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The day when you can actually do the work
When I’m planning my to do list for the next week or two, I will look at upcoming deadlines, of course, and also what else I may have going on. Do I have a day full of meetings? Is there an afternoon where I can work for a few hours uninterrupted? How long will it actually take me to do all these tasks? If there is someone else who needs to be involved, when are they available?
And this is why I say that the simple way we’re taught about deadlines when we’re young does not work for long, even if it ever did. Yes, it is the last possible moment you have to turn something in. But that does not take into consideration all the complications that go into doing the work. Or that something can crop up — a last-minute project, for instance, or a much-needed sick day — to interfere with when you can do that work.
So my personal deadlines are rarely the day or time that something is due. My deadline is the day and time by which I think I can get the work done, with some extra time tacked on to accommodate last-minute requests, work emergencies and times when my brain just doesn’t want to do the work.
Let’s consider a task that I complete for every magazine issue (in my day job, I run the print version of Science News Explores): an art memo for the design team. This document lays out what art is available for each story and what thoughts I have on what the stories should look like. I know that this task will take about two to three hours to complete. The production schedule gives me three days in which to complete it, with the deadline being when I need to send the document to the design team.
My personal deadline, though, might consider that Monday mornings are full of meetings, pages for an issue are coming in for review Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon I have an appointment. So my deadline will be Tuesday noon, leaving me Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning to do the work.
Break it up
This technique is a must for big projects, but if you’re someone who has a brain that doesn’t get motivated until deadline, you might want to try this for even smaller tasks.
It’s pretty easy: You take the task and you split it up into pieces. Then you assign deadlines to all the pieces, working your way to the final deadline. (Make sure you leave yourself some time to review everything at the end. That can be the final piece of the deadline puzzle.)
If you don’t know where to start, this might be a time to try out some AI. Goblin.tools has a Magic ToDo function that will break down tasks into smaller and smaller pieces. But once you start this practice, you probably won’t need any assistance. Your brain may start to see everything in its component parts, and then all you’re doing is some math to figure out when to set deadlines for all those pieces.
False deadlines
If you’re consistently missing deadlines (or you work with someone who ignores the deadlines you set), then consider setting false deadlines. These deadlines sit before the real deadline, and they give you time to do what you need (or send out more reminders to your coworker that you really do need that item today).
Since these deadlines are false, they might not motivate you like a real deadline. But they’re worth a try.
What are your favorite deadline hacks? Comment on this post or email me — I’ll share my favorite hacks in a future newsletter.
Next time: How to set up your deadlines in ToDoIst.
— Sarah
P.S. If you’ve got a question, comment or idea for a future newsletter, please email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And if someone forwarded this to you (hint, hint), check out my first post and what you can expect from The Systematic Scribe.