“The best way to get anything done is to have a tight deadline,” said a friend’s husband when we were chatting about how to make progress on a long-term study assignment she had.
My friend had given herself a target of 12 months to achieve her goal – finish studying the course, do revisions, and take the certification exam. She had also timed it so that she would take the exam in March, which is examination time in India. Her child would be studying for her annual exams, and my friend thought this would be great to get her into the mindset of prepping for the exam.
My friend and her husband were discussing a very useful strategy for getting things done: setting a deadline.
Deadlines are great. They work well to get things done.
Most of us work well with deadlines. A client deliverable cut-off timelines that are not negotiable, like filing a tax return, catching a flight, or arranging a loved one’s birthday party. We do very well where it is painful to re-negotiate, or the consequences of missing the deadline are outside our window of tolerance.
But deadlines are also double-edged swords. If not handled carefully, we could end up killing ourselves with the sword.
So, how do we channel the power of deadlines while not overdoing it? Let’s find out.
The three things we’ll cover are
1. What makes deadlines work, and how is it related to biology?
2. The flipside of deadlines that leads to procrastination
3. How to harness the power of deadlines without overdoing it.
What makes deadlines work, and how is it related to biology?
World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in history in the 20th century. Despite the gore and the brutality with which human lives were taken, there is a remarkable and heart-warming event that stands out.
On Christmas Eve, 1914, an event occurred along some parts of the Western Front. An unofficial, spontaneous truce in the form of a ceasefire happened on both fronts.
Initially, both sides were sceptical that a surprise attack by the other army would follow this.
But, as the evening set in, the British troops heard their German counterparts signing carols and patriotic songs. They even saw fir trees and lanterns set up along the German trenches.
Both armies exchanged messages and Christmas greetings across the trenches. One German soldier shouted, “Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.” Thus, the truce was born.
The following day, on Christmas, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land, exchanged gifts, played football and took photographs.
Christmas Day was a temporal landmark that prompted the spontaneous truce on both sides.
Temporal landmarks are specific points in time, like Christmas Day, which serves as a mental marker. This marks a significant day or a fresh start that prompts people to make significant changes.
Deadlines are powerful temporal end-markers.
They establish a specific point in time, after which some significant change would have occurred. This spurs us to forward momentum, causing a series of biochemical changes in the body.
The brain activates the body’s flight-or-flight response to deal with the challenge or perceived threat in our way.
The anticipation of a reward at the end of the deadline increases dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. Depending on how we perceive the task, cortisol is released, adrenaline surges and the sympathetic nervous system is activated, preparing the body to fight or flee. So, a whole load of chemical cocktails gets triggered in the body.
While working towards the deadline, our focus sharpens, our energy levels increase, and our bodies help us meet the deadline.
This is why we feel a rush, relief, or even euphoria when we meet deadlines.
This is the biological and neurological reason why deadlines are powerful.
Some of us can recognise this behaviour in the words we have used to describe ourselves, “I work really well under pressure.” Our bodies get primed for action, and deadlines are the markers that can be reached through action.
Apart from serving as temporal markers, deadlines also provide an important function of lending structure to your work and life.
Deadlines make it easy to structure, prioritise and organise your work.
You would have noticed this in your own life. The few days before an important deadline, you have no problems prioritising your work or life. All effort is geared towards making the massive push of action to get you to your deadline.
When there are time-bound deadlines, they lend structure to how you organise your work. If there is an important steering committee meeting at 2:30 pm every first Wednesday, you already know that the preparation for the meeting will take over Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Everything else goes to the back burner.
The flipside of deadlines
A few years back, I was suffering from allergies continuously for close to two years. I had to take an antihistamine every day to stop the sneezing attacks. I was bummed out and was ready to try anything to get these symptoms to diminish.
As part of an alternative treatment, it was found that I was allergic to potatoes! I loved potatoes. I was ‘programmed’ to make my body accept potatoes more readily, and for three days, I had to include potatoes in all my meals.
I was delighted. I was getting a chance to indulge in one of my favourite foods. On the first day, I made my favourite potato curry and rice. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal. I made different dishes using potatoes for the following two meals, and my excitement for potatoes steadily muted.
The next day, I wasn’t enthusiastic about making or eating potatoes. But it was part of the treatment, so with a lot of reluctance, I made potatoes and finished them with great difficulty.
On the third day, I was positively disgusted by potatoes. I was prepared to starve rather than touch a potato. Potatoes were now tiresome.
Too many deadlines can be like my love affair with potatoes – tiresome.
If you have deadlines coming at you one after the other, without a break, it can be more than tiresome—it can lead to burnout.
You have a car that can run at a maximum speed of 120 mph. But would you always drive your vehicle at that speed?
Of course not; you are probably saying this to yourself.
If you drive your car at top speed every time, the engine will overheat, the tyres will wear out faster, and your car will soon break down. It is also very likely that you do not get the same kick out of your vehicle when you occasionally run it at top speed.
If you depend only on the power of deadlines to get things done, enjoyable stress quickly turns into burnout stress. Our bodies are not always designed to handle the fight-or-flight response and its chemical cocktail. With a constant increase in adrenaline, the body produces a lot of cortisol, thereby reducing blood flow to the digestive system and other vital body functions needed for long-term survival. The body prioritises only short-term survival.
The flip side of always needing a challenge or deadline to get to work is that your brain will tire of the stress stimulation and increased dopamine production. It is like a drug addiction. Once you get addicted, you need more of the drug to produce the same rush.
Your brain gets used to the stimulation of rush and will need to produce more dopamine to generate the same rush, euphoria or sense of relief that comes from meeting the deadline. So, it urges you to act in a way that ensures it gets its steady supply of dopamine – it means it won’t let you rest or act when there is no pressure, aka deadline.
Some consequences of overdependence on deadlines are procrastination, loss of motivation, and not taking action if the stakes are not high enough.
These make deadlines a double-edged sword. As much as deadlines are needed to beat procrastination and inaction, they can also lead us into a vicious loop of causing procrastination and inaction.
So, how do we balance the advantages and disadvantages of deadlines and make it work for us?
How can we harness the power of deadlines without overdoing them?
There are three ways in which you can harness the power of deadlines without overdoing the impact on your body and brain.
1. Nip perfectionism in the bud
2. Create well-defined work blocks
3. Use the psychological power of the progress bar
Nip perfectionism in the bud
Perfectionism is one of the biggest enemies of getting things done. And every single one of us is a perfectionist at something.
Perfectionism also translates into procrastination. If you have deadlines to meet, you should park your perfectionist tendencies aside for another project or task.
When you are working towards a deadline, the biggest monster that will slow you down and grind you to a halt in the journey is a quest for perfectionism. This fallacy is palpable, especially if the deadline is in the distant future rather than in the here and now.
So, how do you nip perfectionism in the bud when working towards a deadline? You need to set a benchmark for what is good enough and what is perfect.
For example, when I put together a deck for a meeting, I would pull all the stops to ensure that I had all the information in hand before creating the final deck.
But over the years, I realised that the last few hours before the meeting were putting a lot of pressure on me as I waited for inputs to trickle down to me.
As an antidote to finishing this task, meeting the deadline and moving on with other tasks that would stall until I had completed this, I would create placeholders on the slide pack and say “Last Updated On: <<Date>>.
Surprisingly, the stakeholders didn’t often ask me why a few slides in the slide deck weren’t up to date. If asked, I’d say, “I am waiting for information on this and did not receive it when I pulled the deck together yesterday.”
Earlier, my perfectionist tendencies would have ensured that I was chasing down every single person who had to give me input, badgering them, or going on a hunt to find the information myself. Instead, I decided to chill and get onto other things by letting go of the need to have everything in place and leaving some things out of place.
This will save you time and energy, freeing up your mental bandwidth to focus on other things on your to-do list.
Creating well-defined work blocks in your schedule
Deadlines have a way of taking over your entire day and, if not most, of your productive working hours.
It would be great to harness the power of the deadlines to give us some steady motivation and progress towards our completion. One of the great ways to harness the dopamine rush and prevent the stress of the final push is to break down the final deadline into work blocks, each with its specific outcome.
For example, I have been writing this article for a few hours. I know I will feel relief when I am finally done with it, but the restlessness during the times between tasks makes it hard for me to focus on anything else.
So, I have chunked this task down into brainstorming, outlining, writing each section (500 words), editing and formatting.
Each work block has a defined time limit and completion criteria. I get a small but steady dopamine release, which lets me move from one task to another while getting towards my final deadline, with as little as is humanly possible while maximising my enjoyment of the process.
Scheduling these well-defined work blocks in your calendar and making them non-negotiable will ensure that you get into a rhythm with your work without making a herculean effort for every deadline.
Use the psychological power of the progress bar
Have you noticed the progress bar on your computer or any application?
The progress bar is so ubiquitous that we expect to see it everywhere. The progress bar gives us a sense of progress; it shows us that things are progressing (even if the download has inched up slowly from 9% to 10% after an eternity). It offers us a sense of predictability to know how much is completed and how much remains.
We can tap into the psychological power of the progress bar.
If our task is 100% and we should have completed it by our deadline, then we can assess our progress at the end of each significant work block or milestone or the end of an appropriate period (say, days or weeks).
Now, while writing these words, I know that I am 70% of the way into the article, and only 30% remains to be done. This gives me a sense of how far I have come and how far I need to go, which helps me maintain my energy and motivation on my way to completion.
You can document this % completion alongside your to-do list item or in your work block scheduled in your calendar.
Summary
So, to wrap up this article on harnessing the power of deadlines, here are the key points to take away.
- Deadlines stimulate our body and brain into a state of readiness, focus and attention by priming it for fight and flight response.
- Deadlines are a great way to get things done but are a double-edged sword.
- Overuse of deadlines can lead to procrastination, burn out and inaction.
- We can harness the power of deadlines without overdoing it by nipping perfectionism in the bud, creating well-defined time blocks and using the psychological power of the progress bar.
