Designing Under Pressure

Unlocking the psychology behind deadlines can help product teams become more resilient

Designing under the pressure of deadlines can be challenging for any product team. Just like in any other collaborative environment, deadlines and time constraints may cause friction in the design and development process and lead to rushed brainstorming, sloppy research, and incomplete designs. They can also inhibit creativity, causing teams to rely on familiar solutions rather than exploring new and innovative ideas.

But there’s a flip side. Predictable and reliable time limits are important tools for successfully completing projects. They allow teams to prioritize tasks and allocate resources effectively, and help keep individuals and teams accountable for their work. And not to mention, they’re a non-negotiable fact of life.

As a cognitive psychologist, I’m interested in the different ways that teams deal with deadlines and timelines. How do time management practices affect things like performance and motivation? Understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms may help us work more effectively within set timeframes without sacrificing product quality or team dynamics. Below, I’d like to shed some light on what’s at play when we work with deadlines and provide some tips on how product teams can turn pressure into opportunity.

Make the Mere Urgency Effect work for you

The Mere Urgency Effect refers to the phenomenon where people perceive a task as more important, valuable or necessary to complete when it is associated with a deadline or a sense of urgency. You might be familiar with Parkison’s Law, the old adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In fact, recent research confirms that humans tend to tackle urgent tasks immediately, avoiding important activities with a more distant deadline.

It seems that we subconsciously make an inference on the difficulty level based on the available time to completion, meaning that something that we need to finish in a week’s time is perceived to be more difficult than a task due in a day. The Mere Urgency Effect can be a powerful tool for motivating product teams and increasing productivity. You can make this phenomenon work for you when creating a project timeline:

· Do: Split important activities that require more time into smaller parts with dedicated, short and yet realistic milestones. Introduce reminders or short-term deadlines to create a (sensible!) sense of urgency and proximity to push the required activities up the priority list.

· Don’t: Wait for the important tasks to become urgent just because time runs out.

Get into the flow

A slightly different take on deadlines comes from the concept of “flow” from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This is where an activity can generate a positive experience, leading to intense focus, a feeling of immersion, a sense of personal control, and an altered subjective experience of time. There are some prerequisites to achieve a flow state: having a clearly set goal, getting immediate feedback where possible, and having a good match between the perceived challenges and the available skills. Simply put: If the task is too easy, boredom is likely to occur; if the skill level is too low, anxiety can be the result.

To a certain extent, treating time as a restricted resource can actually push the performance and adjust the level of expectations so that team members can enter the corridor of positive experience or “flow channel” more easily.

· Do: Adjust the timeframe properly to the skills level and expected outcome to create a balance between what is expected and what can be done.

· Don’t: Forget to add a bit of a stretch (but not too much) to enhance the positive experience.

Avoid the trap of intermittent reinforcement

Reliability and trust are the cornerstones of successful project management and outcomes. Simply put, if you expect others to comply to the rules, you need to walk the talk yourself. Allowing exceptions from the rules without consequences can jeopardize the team’s discipline, compliance, and the resulting output. Even more so if the team perceives this exception as a random event.

When team members are not consistently held accountable for missing deadlines, it can have detrimental effects on the whole team. A lack of consistency can make the problematic behavior more difficult to stop. In behavioral psychology, we speak of the principle of intermittent reinforcement. This is when a certain behavior is rewarded or addressed at random. Without establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the behavior and the consequence, team morale can be negatively impacted, leading to feelings of envy, demotivation, and frustration.

When it comes to setting deadlines along the design and development cycle, it’s important to be flexible. If it becomes obvious that the timebox was too short to achieve the expected result with the desired quality, this is an opportunity to adjust the timeline for the next iteration or phase. However, it shouldn’t be an excuse to jeopardize the time structure of the current phase — at least not if you want to retain the harmony and integrity of the team.

· Do: Keep an eye on the team’s stress level and their capacity to fulfill their tasks within the timeline, adjusting as needed for future tasks

· Don’t: Compromise the team spirit by introducing ad-hoc exceptions and extensions

Making friends with deadlines

Writer Rita Mae Brow once dubbed deadlines “a negative inspiration”, but the reality can be more complicated. Time boxes and deadlines can be stressful, but they are a necessary means to structure work and drive successful teamwork.

Having an awareness about the psychological mechanisms at play can help us understand how to navigate deadlines better. Particularly for long-term or recurring activities, monitoring the match of capabilities, capacity, and outcome closely and continuously, and making the necessary adjustments along the way, is key. In the words of Jason Fried, “a fixed deadline and a flexible scope are the crucial combination.”

Bettina Laugwitz is a UX Design Manager at SAP with 20+ years of experience in project work and leadership roles in academia and the software industry. She holds a PhD in cognitive psychology with a focus on industrial psychology and research methodologies.

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