Deadline: Yesterday
Ah, the wonderful age of urgency. Everything needs to be done before it’s even asked to be done. Tasks and requirements and jobs and briefs are handed over left, right and centre and every single one of them is stamped with the daunting mark of an URGENT deadline.
Who’s to blame here? Is it the person briefing us on the job? Is it the person briefing them? Perhaps it’s us, for setting expectations we can’t meet? In my opinion, we are all to blame. Over the last decade we’ve grown so accustomed to everything being done at the speed of light that we often forget that none of us humans are able to even fathom the grandeur that is the speed of light.
The same frustration emits when our ADSL line is too slow when several years ago we didn’t even know it existed. The same anguish when your phone takes more than 3 seconds to send an email when not long ago it merely had a green screen. The same pain of waiting for Youtube to buffer your video of rainbow cats when just the other day you had to go to the DVD store to get a movie. And there was no such thing as rainbow cats.
It all comes to down to our desire to always be faster. Move faster, act faster, do faster. Nothing is quick enough these days. This phenomenon worsens exponentially (just when you thought it can’t get worse). What happens when something goes too fast for your human comprehension? It vanishes. Poof. Gone. Exploded. Nadda. Game over.
This had led to our inability to understand and appreciate virtues like patience or respect for one’s time, and we relinquish all ethics and break all processes and barriers to achieve the single disheartening task of meeting an unimaginable deadline. In the past, if someone needed something done, they would approach the person with the required skills whose profession it was and request what was needed. The professional will then commit the unthinkable and inform his new potential client of how long it will take him to complete the task requested of him, and the client would nod in agreement and move on with his life.
In other words, people were given the time to do what that they do best, not told how long it should take them to do so. Imagine that.
Let’s play a comparison game.
Say you’re at a restaurant, a 3 Michelin-star Italian masterpiece, and one of their specials is a world-renowned Chicken Piccata dish. Upon ordering it, the waiter informs you that due to the complexity of the dish, it will take 20 minutes to prepare. Now, you won’t simply say you want it in 10 minutes, right? You can try, but the waiter will look bedazzled and walk away. Let’s assume that, even beyond logic and the waiter’s sincerity, you demanded that dish to be served to you in 10 minutes. You know what you’ll get? Salmonella. You will then call up the waiter, furious with what was served to you and your impending disease, and require for it to be cooked further, only now you will have to wait even longer than usual for the dish before it is ready to your taste.
You see, with a simple analogy I’ve depicted the fallacy of the 21st century deadlines. A client approaches a professional to complete a certain task he specialises in. The specialist provides a time frame required (not desired) to complete such a task, yet the client often demands it sooner than possible. It is in the specialist’s nature to give you the best of his work, and cutting corners simply to meet an unrealistic deadline is not going to make either party happy and will often lead to more reverts.
No one wants to serve you raw chicken, give us time to cook it.
