Out there in the real world, sometimes deadlines exist. The date of Black Friday won’t change (unless it ends up starting a day earlier, than another day earlier, and eventually in August) so if you need your ad campaigns and products ready by then—that’s a hard deadline.
But deadlines like that are the exception, not the rule. Can you finish writing this article by Wednesday at 5:11pm? If you actually end up giving it to me at 5:19pm, 8 minutes late, what has really changed? Nothing. I won’t process it and hand it off until tomorrow anyway. It is, for all practical purposes, a fake deadline.
(That doesn’t mean it’s not important! As I’ve written in other chapters, it’s important to comply with deadlines, and if you can’t, to alert the stakeholders as early as possible, even on the small stuff.)
But the fakery of almost all deadlines is important. Why? Because, for most people, even knowing it’s fake—both you and I know that if you give it to me at 5:19pm and not 5:11pm, nothing will change, absolutely nothing, they take it with a deeper seriousness.
Such is human nature, and we can’t fight it. Even meч I wanted to complete all chapters I’m writing now by a certain end of the month date so now I have to go overtime into supercharge mode to have it all done! My own fake deadline works even against myself. (A lesson in that is that revealing a strategy usually doesn’t weaken its effectiveness, especially when human psychology is involved.)
Now, we can use this bug in human psychology to our advantage. How? Give deadlines to your teammates. They will overwhelmingly likely perform to the deadline.
There are a few details here that make the strategy more powerful.
First, I tend to ask people to set their own deadlines. That has even more power because you said yourself you can do it by then! No blaming an annoying client for forcing an unrealistic deadline on you.
Second, what’s much, much better than deadlines are processes. In fact, if we need to do a trade-off between the two, I’d choose processes over deadlines at any time. So, the power of deadlines is magnified if there is a process behind it. It’s one thing to say, “I need 15 chapters written by the end of the month,” that’s psychological power. However, the superpower comes if you say, “Okay, so I will write two per day, the first starting at 9:30am and the second starting at 2:30pm, and I won’t let anything get in the way of those, even blocking those times off in my calendar and going into isolation during those times.”
Deadlines can be helpful, but processes are much more powerful. Ultimately, great processes combined with just-slightly-aggressive deadlines taken together are magic want of getting others to be productive.
However, the secret of the effectiveness is just making yourself forget that they’re fake. You have to take them very seriously—as does everyone else. If you ask your teammates to create their own deadline and then you joke about how fake it is, it loses its oomph. Saying words can make them magical—indeed, the word “spell” implies both spelling letters into words, and casting magic spells—but once said, it becomes real. Or once written, at least, since you will document it, right?
And you know who you can even ask to create his own deadlines? That’s right, your boss or your client. The power of deadlines isn’t just effective for reports, but for everyone. Why not ask your client to give himself a deadline for that information he really owes you and is behind on?
