I used to work in the construction industry. I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs talking about that, and I promise it’ll be worth your while.
Construction companies make strict plans for each stage of their projects. They meticulously plan every detail of the project. They plan for the specific days that materials will arrive on site, so that they have crews there to turn those materials into buildings. They schedule their equipment to be on site months in advance so that they don’t run into a situation where they need to excavate and there’s no excavator available.
The point is, planning is a huge, huge, hugely important thing in construction. It is so important that some companies dedicate entire teams to the planning process.
Planning is so important in construction because the margins are thin and delays (beyond what is expected) cost money. A billion dollar project might only have a margin of a few million dollars. If the workers are sitting around waiting for shipments, or waiting for equipment, they’re just costing the company without being productive. That eats into their margins.
Worse, construction companies often have to pay a fine to their clients when they miss a deadline for certain milestones agreed upon in their contracts. This adds insult to injury when things go off the rails, schedule-wise.
Despite this, construction companies regularly miss their deadlines. When I say regularly, I mean 30-50% of the time.
30-50% of the time!!
That’s how f*cking hard it is to meet deadlines. Even when millions of dollars are on the line, even when entire teams are dedicated to planning, even when fines need to be paid - deadlines still need to be pushed like half the time.
It’s Personal
If you’re anything like me, you have this amazing ability to make plans for the future. You can lay out a complex project from start to finish - organizing it into milestones, deadlines, and even adding buffer time to account for things that come up.
However, when it comes time to execute, these plans tend to fall by the wayside. Deadlines are missed. The beautiful, methodical order to each task and subtask turns into a jumbled mess. New tasks are created - old ones are discarded as not actually important.
Why is it so hard?
If you’ve been a productivity enthusiast for some time, it is no mystery why meeting deadlines is hard. Things come up that you didn’t foresee - sickness, changing priorities, things are harder/more complex than you imagined, etc. Meeting deadlines is so hard that some people have sworn off deadlines entirely - however I feel that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
How do we fix this?
We don’t. Frankly, it is probably impossible to do better than meeting 50% of your deadlines. Maybe you can do better on a subset and meet all your really important deadlines - the ones that you use sparingly for your most important clients or stakeholders. But when thinking about all your deadlines - internal, external, soft, and hard - they are always going to be a mess.
And that is okay.
I believe that deadlines are made to be pushed.
Deadlines are like goals: they are aspirational. They are an estimate of when something will get done. When you estimate things, you have a sense that you’ll be wrong most of the time - but you’ll land somewhere in the middle. Except with deadlines, people tend to be more aspirational than they are…um…conservative.
When you set deadlines for really important things, you might add a “ conservative buffer” - a week, a month, or something like that. Buffers can’t be too long because then you lose the urgency needed to get something done. They also can’t be too long because clients don’t want to wait longer for your work than they need to. You can’t tell a bride that her wedding dress will be ready after her wedding date…
Deadlines are useful in creating urgency and in setting priorities, and that’s why I designed Dreamtask around them. It automatically pushes deadlines that are not met, and treats hard deadlines differently than soft deadlines - so you can get the best of both worlds.
Conclusion
What I’m really trying to say is that, soft deadlines - which are most deadlines - function more like priorities. Hard deadlines are theoretically set in stone, but as I’ve said above, even they are often no match for the realities of life. In those circumstances, it is best to get good at communicating with the people you will inevitably disappoint.
If you want to automate the process of pushing the deadlines you will inevitably miss, and avoid the shame of it all, check out Dreamtask. Or maybe a similar tool - if you want.