Shipping, deadlines and failure
“Real artists ship” — the famous Steve Jobs quote.
So it’s 11:39pm Friday and we’ve just shipped a ton of deliverables for a client.
To be clear, I absolutely hate working late but due to some technical issues it ended up being a late one.
We could absolutely have waited and sent it first thing on Monday, and chipped away at it slowly over the weekend, but we said we’d get it done by this date, and we did. Now our client knows that a date we commit to is a date we deliver. But even better? The team does, we do, I do.
In the world of projects often we treat deadlines as if they’re guidelines. This creates a culture of not shipping, ambiguous estimation and worst, lack of ownership and accountability. “I’ll get it done today, probably tomorrow, maybe by Wednesday”. This small habit leads to failure. We can’t trust our plans, we can’t trust our word, and we can’t trust ourselves.
We need to deliver on the date we commit to delivering, and force ourselves to pick the right dates and fight through the last mile.
There are 2 tricks to always meeting your deadlines.
- Self impose a ton of other deadlines
- Ship when it’s the deadline. Saturday Night Live doesn’t start when it’s ready, it start’s when it’s Saturday night.
This doesn’t mean ship poor quality, what it means is to break through the last few miles where we overthink things, doubt ourselves, want to slip in just one or two more features, and also… tell ourselves “it’s ok, I can finish it tomorrow”.
Ship early, ship often, ship seriously. You’ll get permission to keep shipping.
