Why you should have a deadline for (almost) everything
On the surface, nobody likes deadlines. They force you to work and, more importantly, to finish something until a specific point in time. They are the worst nightmare of every perfectionist. Yet, they are incredibly useful and you should have more of them.
Everybody loves deadlines
When I was young, I grew up on a farm (well, not an active one, but still). At the weekends, there was always something to do, from cleaning my room to chopping wood. My parents usually said something like: “Please finish these three tasks before you play football/ read a book / etc.”
That was the first time I got deadlines.
And guess what, I hated them. Nothing is more annoying than getting the new Castlevania game and then your mom jumps into the room and throws a list of tasks your way.
But you know what? After I finished the tasks and finally sat down to play, I felt great. Not only because of having some free time, but also because I knew that I achieved something already. I completed all my tasks in time.
Deadlines at work
Today, I am more used to deadlines because of my job. At work, deadlines are everywhere. There is a product owner who really needs some mockups and user research for the upcoming sprint planning. There is somebody from Marketing who really wants you to finish the blog article about typography. And then there is your boss who wants you to do three other things until tomorrow.
I still don’t like every deadline I get, but I know now that they are not only a necessary evil, but they also help to get things done (and isn’t that all that matters in the end?). If nobody working with you had deadlines, you would most likely not get your stuff done either.
One of the reasons we need deadlines in our work-life is perfectionism. As a UX designer, I really want to deliver the best possible solution to the users. Polished, pixel-perfect and lightning fast. I want to test every single iteration, ideally with lots of real users covering all our personas using different devices in different contexts.
The same is true for developers who could probably optimise and refactor their code for ages and I guess that is also the case for others outside of the design and development space. If you really like what you’re doing, you want to be proud of it and therefore, you want to spend as much time possible to create what you think is the best possible outcome.
Fortunately, you’re not creating something for yourself to look at and be proud of, but rather something that is going to be used by others. As a Product Manager, you do not want to tell your customers that they need to wait another two weeks for the promised update because the developers are still not 100% happy with the code. If you’re a good PM, you want to deliver something valuable to your customers as often and as early as possible.
However, that is only possible with deadlines, no matter if it is the end of a sprint, a promised release date or something completely different.
Deadlines for side projects
Every designer who thought about creating a side project knows the struggle about not having a deadline. It’s your personal website, an app idea you had in your mind for a while or something else, but it’s your little thingy and all of a sudden, there is nothing that forces you to launch it.
At first, this can seem like a good thing. You can experiment, iterate and test whatever you like for as long as you want. Why not create another ten variations of the website with different color sets? Why not try a different onboarding process before building the thing?
The truth is, you will never get even close to launch without a deadline. As a professional, we will always find something to improve, something to change, something we might still not be perfectly happy with. And do you know what? That’s fine.
If everything would be perfect, there would be no need for somebody looking for ways to make it better. In that case, I would need to look for a completely different job (and you would maybe too).
Don’t think about the font choices you made again. Nothing is set in stone, anyway, so go ahead, launch your site and get some feedback from others. Real-life feedback is way more important than anything else, but you won’t get it until your project is out there for people to look at and to play with.
Fail early, fail often.
That’s why I set deadlines for my side projects. You can always improve later on, but before you think about how to do this or that in five different ways, just do it in one way and see what others think about it.
Deadlines everywhere
There’s another thing I really hate and I’m sure you do, too. Doctors appointments. From picking up the phone to entering the room, the whole experience is nothing I really enjoy doing. Nevertheless, I still do it because I also do not enjoy losing my teeth or having some other issues I can hardly explain to others.
That being said, I made the experience that I procrastinate less with these things when I set a deadline. It’s usually pretty damn simple, like “Make a dentist appointment until the end of the week”, but it helps a lot.
So with all those awesome New Year’s resolutions you just made, why not set deadlines for those as well? Otherwise, chances are high you’ll make the same ones again at the end of the year and that’d be a pity.