The “deadline effect,” Cox explains, explains why tourists see the landmarks that locals never get to. It’s something we’ve all experienced: that last-minute urgency we feel to spring into action when we know we’re running out of time. It’s the built-in delay and 11th-hour scrambling that accompany strike negotiations and college term papers. It’s the fire that lights up beneath us when our lukewarm, procrastinating hearts finally believe we have to deliver or we’ll miss our chance.
I know we know this already about deadlines: they’re motivating.
But here’s what else Cox wants us to grasp about deadlines: they prove, in a variety of scenarios, that having more time to meet them isn’t necessarily to our advantage. Cox makes a compelling case for this in his book where he gathers examples of how shorter timeframes for completing a task were more motivating to people.
There’s the Census experiment in which an A/B test showed that people with less time (7 days less) to return a survey, were more likely to return it. In another study that gave people a coupon for a free slice of cake, the people with less time to claim their treat (3 weeks) were more likely to actually do so than those who had more time (2 months) to do so. 31% of the first group got their cake (and presumably ate it too) as compared to 6% of the second group. (Cox, The Deadline Effect).
What is especially intriguing to me about this last example (and the tourist phenomenon—both presented in the work of Suzanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy) is that the deadline effect shows up even with pleasant actions like claiming free cake. Shu and Gneezy title their work the “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences.”
Human behavior is a little bit confusing, isn’t it?
I’m not going to try delve into the psychology of why we put off doing nice things (but seriously, why??)
What I will do with this phenomenon is ask those of us setting our own project timelines: do we really need all the time we give ourselves? What would happen if we gave ourselves less time for certain segments of our project work? I’m guessing we’d still delay. But there’s also the chance that by reducing the gaping expanse between us and a delivery date, that we’d be less likely to miss the deadline entirely.
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“Set yourself a deadline, the earlier the better.”
– Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect
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That is Cox’s message. Summing up his book in single line, he says it’s this: “Set a deadline, the earlier the better.”
Will you catch me ascending the Space Needle this weekend? Probably not. But …. I am going to feel better the next time I have less time to turn something around. Because, when I look back on my past and all those deadlines that have come and gone in my work, it was the ones with distant due dates that caused me the most mental grief. The shorter, surprise deadlines (when they weren’t too ridiculously impossible)—those were dispatched with less anguish, and, I’d argue, similar quality.
I’ll leave you solo project-planneurs, then, with a challenge this week: give one of your deadlines a withering look and, if it’s not too ridiculously impossible (technical term), move it up.
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