Why I Never Rely on Deadlines Anymore to Motivate Performance

Steal my quick, 5-step guide to spur action sooner (without the deadline).

Conventional wisdom says deadlines help us get things done, but my experiences tells a different story. One of cut corners, haste, anxiety, and lackluster results.

I’m a master procrastinator. I wait until the last possible moment to start working when a deadline looms. And I’m not alone. Many fall into the same pattern.

Some say it’s Parkinson’s Law at work (more on this later). But I sense there’s more to it. I decided to research deeper, giving myself two weeks.

That was two weeks ago, and I’m only now getting started. See, there it is again — I’m an expert at the delayed start.

For procrastinators like me, the best time to start the work is always…tomorrow.

I may thread the needle and meet the deadline. But my quality suffers, and my stress levels soar.

I see product teams often push efforts to the last minute. They do this with both distant deadlines and near ones. And the right product has no room to emerge. 

In the product world, you can’t avoid complexity and uncertainty.

Every step is an adventure. In product, wasting time by delaying action doesn’t breed success. And deadlines further restrict your space to iterate.

Action provides data, but it’s worthless if you run out of time to act on it.

A delayed start when facing a product deadline can have several unsavory effects.

• Compromised internal product quality.
• Reduced user experience due to features that didn’t make it.
• Stressed-out team members working 80-hour weeks to pull it off.
• Failure to launch or explosion on the launch pad due to poor workmanship.

Deadlines are a false foothold. As I have explored before, they don’t give you the success you desire. And I don’t rely on them as a motivator or tactic for my teams.

Yet, many corporations turn to deadlines to spur performance and get results quicker. But the actual effect is often procrastination, demotivated teams, and shoddy products.

What do studies say about our tendency to delay action when faced with deadlines?

Cyril Northcote Parkinson published “Parkinson’s Law” in The Economist in 1955¹.

Parkinson illustrates, with humor, how “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” He describes how a woman had an entire day to send a postcard. She spent an hour finding the card, another hour looking for her glasses, and so on, until the whole day was used up. Even simple tasks take much longer to complete than needed when you have too much time.

Adding extra effort to fill the time available does not scream high performance to me.

Also, I find Parkinson’s Law does not always tie to the product world.

Usually, the companies I work with don’t have too little work and too much time. They have more work than they can handle, too little time to do it, and not enough budget to make it happen.

Yet, these product teams still wait until the end to get busy.

Biting off too much high-risk, complex work and then dilly-dallying doesn’t end in success. And the size and complexity of the work don’t seem to influence our actions. We delay action, no matter what.

So, I had to dig deeper into this than Parkinson’s Law.

Here are the 4 key findings from my research.

Finding 1: As a deadline approaches, the motivation to complete it increases.

Temporal Motivation Theory² shows why we have a flurry of activity when a deadline nears.

The task’s value, expected success, and remaining time drive our last-minute surge. Far off deadlines delay immediate action, like how I only studied for end-of-semester tests in school the night before.

So, to give a deadline traction, it should be right in front of you.

Finding 2: Distant deadlines are less real.

Long-term deadlines feel abstract and less rewarding.

But an immediate deadlines prompt action. The goal takes shape and tasks have a more pressing purpose. This prompts and sustains action.³

Studies show how we prefer quick rewards over long-term benefits. The farther into the future, the less the reward motivates you.⁴

That’s why I might watch that cat versus rattlesnake YouTube video over preparing for my presentation due in two months. Who knows what my talk will cover. But look, that cat has mad skills.  

Make your goal take shape and spur action by bringing it closer.

Finding 3: Outcome fear prevents action.

This one hits home.

Fear of outcomes can stall action. I did this when I was nervous about a recent podcast interview, finding any excuse not to prepare. Why would I want to spend my time prepping for something I know I suck at?

Studies show high-stakes outcomes cause us to delay. Supportive feedback and reducing perceived failure threats can help.⁵

Safety can ignite our desire to take action, despite the risk.

Finding 4: Small, achievable goals you set yourself work best.

Self-directed, realistic goal-setting is effective.

Research highlights the importance of autonomy in goal setting. Small, well-defined goals fit better into busy schedules and support motivation. Quick wins you own make a difference.⁶

I see teams being handed deadlines all the time they had no hand in setting. And it’s never a cakewalk. Not only is there no ownership, there’s no urgency to face the hairy, imposed deadline.

Tiny, self-set goals reduce dread.

My 5-Step, Quick Guide to Bypass Deadline-Driven Procrastination

These findings clarify why deadlines don’t improve performance. 

You can benefit from this research when facing any type of deadline-legitimate or fake. We don’t have to let deadlines be deadly.

I reflected on the research and my experience facing deadlines with 154 product teams. Here is my quick, 5-step guide to avoid deadline-driven procrastination. 

Let’s dive in.

Setting the stage: Motivation to act is internal, not external.

Deadlines are a stick, a whip.

While we often act on external motivators, they don’t last. We end up resenting an external incentive. The best motivation actually comes from within. A strong sense of purpose and a high degree of self-direction ensures we have a raging internal fire.

It’s like when a team of mine observed a customer for a day to learn her pain points. The team felt her pain and were motivated to take ownership of the solution. They were like a dog with a bone.

An intrinsic drive like this is what fuels our early action to meet our goals.

To support this concept, one more element from my research stands out. It is from the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. They outline what they call Self-Determination Theory. It outlines autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the critical ingredients for intrinsic motivation.⁸

• Autonomy to have control of the goals you set and to make them realistic.
• Competence to take action, feel supported in trying new things, and get better by learning.
• Relatedness to feel connection and belonging, support, shared action, and respect.

My five steps below embody these elements to set the intrinsic drive in motion.

Step 1: Break free from the threat of failure.

As long as we fear failure, we will delay starting. Even courage has its limits.

I see teams struggling with fear all the time.

Often we perceive fear where there is none, but at times, it’s real and justified. In either case, I’ve found a team needs support from an enabling leader to mitigate the effects. Leaders must provide cover and encouragement to give teams the safety to act.

I’ll never forget a leader who stood up for one of my product teams last year. He said, “I want you to fear nothing. I’ve got you covered.” That one blanket statement erased all fear.

Safety means you can take action without the fear of blame if you fail.

But feeling safe is not enough. Deadlines set far into the future actually breed fear.

They create a line where you succeed or fail. The teams I know have extreme anxiety about this line. It’s called a “dead” line for a reason. And the resulting nervous energy stalls action and erodes confidence.

We need extra measures of safety in the presence of deadlines.

The other steps that follow enhance our ability to act from a place of safety. They reduce risk by making the line closer, more real, and less of a big deal.

Step 2: Set micro goals.

How small is small enough? How tiny do we need to set a goal to avoid the pitfalls of deadline-driven procrastination?

• Is a quarter year small enough? Nah, it’s too big.
• How about a month? Nope, try again.
• A two-week Sprint? No, go smaller.
• Daily? No dice, but getting closer.
• Hourly? Now you’re getting hot.
• Half-hour? You got it!

My experience shows anything more than a half-hour increment will cause procrastination. Heck, I can sometimes find a way to waste time in a half-hour time block. But the ill-effects that can happen in 30 minutes don’t hurt that much.

There’s a great tool for this focused 30-minute micro goal. It’s called The Pomodoro Technique. It helps you break down your work into repeated intervals of 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest.⁷ You should check it out. I find It works great for creating a focused rhythm in my teams. I’ve had many teams tell me they feel ten times more productive using it.

Using micro-goals has many benefits. Here are my top 3:

1. The dopamine rush of making progress.
2. Risk containment (only so much can go wrong).
3. Rapid feedback you can feed into your next micro-goal.

Set a tiny goal for big progress.

The target of a micro-goal is as important as its small size, which leads us to step 3.

Step 3: Engage with your customer daily.

Do you know your customer?

I’ve found this to be a powerful motivator, making the goal real and the reward tangible. The product teams I work with who know their customer have an edge. For example, last year my team killed 36 unnecessary features. It was all because of daily customer sessions. This saved my team from wasted effort and helped them focus on what actually matters to their users.

Less effort and happier users is a strong team motivator.

Knowing your customer brings an immediacy to your goals you can’t get from a far-off deadline.

Building customer empathy like this requires a daily touch. Otherwise, you start to forget them. So, incorporating daily reflection or real-time interaction is mandatory in my experience.

You want to keep your customer front-and-center to drive your action.

But this doesn’t fulfill you completely unless you perform step 4.

Step 4: Harness value early.

Creating something that’s not usable does not motivate action.

If you hit all your micro-goals and put them on a shelf to collect dust, what’s the point? This is what happens with my product teams when they develop working features and don’t give them to users. I had one team who had been collecting finished features for six months and not deploying them. This is how customer-focused micro-goals can still delay value, just like a distant deadline.

It feels good to finish and see it make a difference for your user (or if it doesn’t, you can act to do something about it). The energy this creates in my teams blows away any false motivation a deadline tries to inflict. Making things is not the same as making a difference.

Now, harnessing value alone is one thing, but doing it as a team takes it to a higher level.

Step 5: Work as a team on one valuable item at a time.

There’s power in numbers.

When it comes to making steady progress toward a goal, doing it with a team makes it easier. Even more so with an uncertain path or outcome. I’ve found sharing the load with my teammates to be a procrastination killer. And collective victory is also a strong motivator.

A shared goal builds momentum and safety.

Another powerful number is 1.

One item in flight as a team at a time makes the work easier and the flow smoother. The product teams I work with find it easier to start when they only work on one thing at a time.

Spinning plates, not so much.

If my team has to spin up five things at once, the perils of multitasking kick in. The prospect of starting on too much at once and tripping over each other at a frenetic pace deters action.

It wears me out thinking about it.

So, reduce the work in flight. Use team focus to ease the moment of inertia and harness collective courage.

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That’s it.

To sum up, avoid using deadlines to improve productivity. They don’t work.

Focus instead on internal motivation, micro-goals, and teamwork. You’ll achieve more without the stress of looming deadlines. 

In short: 

1. Create safety.
2. Set micro goals.
3. Focus daily on the customer.
4. Harness early value.
5. Work as a team, one item in focus.

Internal motivation will pulse through you. 

• When will you fix that defect? Today. 
• When will you start talking to your users? Today. 
• When will you tackle that difficult feature? Today. 

So, when will you stop using deadlines to motivate performance? Why not start a better way…today?

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References

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