Why we stopped setting deadlines (and why our productivity increased)
If you happen to miss the deadline - in this you are not alone.
It turns out that people quite often miss the deadlines for work, there are a number of fashionable philosophical reasons explaining why this happens.
And while some people are trying to focus their attention on using a lot of small planning tricks to help you consistently and timely approach deadlines, we noticed a big life hack that really helps us:
')
In our company Edgar, we completely abandoned deadlines - and you can do that too.
No deadlines?
None
We know what you are thinking now:
This idea seems very stupid.
Do not worry - your brain is configured to think so. From the moment you were assigned to do your first homework at school, you were told the time by which you had to complete it - you were always told to complete each task by a certain moment. Therefore, some people insist that nothing would ever have been completed without deadlines.
Probably from an early age you realized that deadlines are very, very important.
In a sense, this is true, but not to the extent that you imagine. Because there are things that may never have been done if they had not had a deadline. For example, paying taxes or car inspection is something you really do not want to do. You do not want to do this, so you are allowed to postpone these tasks only for a certain period of time.
But most things are not. In any case, not in your business. And the attitude towards them as an unpleasant "obliging" can lead to serious problems.
Since certain tasks that you faced throughout your life had built-in deadlines, it is easy to come to the idea that everything needs a clearly defined deadline. In a sense, deadlines are enjoyable, because they give you a specific goal. You know what you need to do, and you know by what point it should be done.
In theory.
But in reality, when you set deadlines for everything you do, many of them you choose arbitrarily. A specific task does not really need to be completed by a given time - you just say you need it. So you feel that you are responsible. Which, perhaps, will not become a problem, except for the fact that not all deadlines have no basis - it is not easy to distinguish deceptive deadlines from real ones. Distinguishing those tasks that must be completed on time from those that do not require haste is rather difficult - and this is where the problems begin.
Deadlines are so often postponed, because not all of them are really needed and significant. And this means that you constantly move tasks on your calendar, trying to find the perfect way to squeeze everything into place so that it makes sense, while most of the tasks should not be there at all. What is easier to collect: a puzzle of 10 thousand. Pieces or 100?
When you set deadlines only for the things that really need them, you can freely prioritize all the other work that needs to be done on the project - and it is much easier to organize them than you might think.
Now there is one big question:
If you do not have deadlines, how do you complete anything?
Based on our experience, the workflow consists of two parts.
First: do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.
Parkinson's law says that the work will fill in all the time allocated for it - set aside a day to complete the work, and it will take a day. Give yourself a week for the same task - it will take a week. And while someone will argue that you just need to set shorter deadlines - this, too, can lead to the fact that you will be in a hurry and do work somehow to have time to complete it on time, instead of allowing her enough time and do everything conscientiously. You can wear down yourself, and your work may also suffer from this (the fact that you can do something in one day alone does not mean that you will actually do it).
Our alternative is a complete rejection of deadlines. As a result, projects take as much time as they really require, and not as much as you devote to them.
And yes - you will still be motivated to do your job, despite the fact that you have no set deadlines. The pessimistic view of Parkinson's law is that if work has no deadline, then you will never find the motivation to do it.
In this view, there is almost as much meaning as in the phrase: "You will die of hunger if you do not make a meal schedule." Your tasks will be solved, because they must be solved, and not because you have marked the date of the deadline in the calendar. If you’re worried about losing any motivation, take a look at the second part of the process: work on only one project at a time.
Even if you feel confident in your ability to do a lot of things at the same time, switching between different tasks still kills your productivity, slows down your work and causes you to work on many half-completed projects until you finish at least one through.
In our company, we force ourselves to work on one project at a time, and only when it is completed can we take on something else.
We organized our workflow according to the kanban system. It looks like this:
In the left column are future projects. Someone selects a project from the To Do list and moves it to the Doing column, starting work on this task. And when the project is ready for the next step - it moves to the right (in this case, the project of the developers moves to the stage of checking the code). As soon as the project completes its path, moving to the rightmost column (Complete - not shown in the figure), the developer can again go to the start, select a new project and repeat the cycle.
Your list of current projects motivates you not to waste time. Of course, you may have to work at the moment on what you really don't want to do. Over something boring, forcing yourself to lose faith in their own abilities, and so on. But you cannot work on anything else until you complete this part of the work - something like the “no ice cream until the porridge is eaten” approach. Maybe this phrase will seem to you something fantastic, but it turns out that the completion of the project is a reward, because then you can start working at the next level. In addition, it gives the motivation to quickly deal with a ton of small annoying tasks - those that in the usual scenario, you would be indefinitely.
From a managerial perspective, deadlines can seem like an invaluable tool to help maintain the effective pace of your team’s work. They look like a crowd of gangsters who are called to remind people that they have certain obligations.
“It seems that you are doing a good job. It will be very unfortunate if ... something happens. "
But do you really want such an approach in your business?
Permanent deadlines can create the wrong ideas in your team. Instead of strengthening the feeling of independence, they turn workers into people who automatically perform tasks only for the sake of another tick.
If you don’t trust your team to just do your job just because it has to be done, and not because the deadline hangs over them, then you should rethink whether you hired those people.
Business will not grow if you take on team those who automatically perform tasks - business develops thanks to people who are able to come up with new ideas and collaborate with you, bringing much greater contribution than working on everything that they were told to do. David Ogilvy in his book Ogilvy On Advertising shared the advice he gave to each head of department in his agency:
“If each of us hires smaller people, we will become a company of gnomes. But if we hire big people from ourselves, then we will become a company of giants. ”
Getting rid of deadlines is not the only way to motivate your team, but it contributes to more productive teamwork and creates a climate of trust - without hard deadlines that can kill the desire to find creative solutions.
Note: This does not at all mean complete disappearance of control.
The refusal of deadlines does not entail the abolition of management - simply the management itself is changing. You have to work with people who want to do their job well, but you can still check their progress and intervene if your help is needed or you want answers when you consider it necessary. If it seems to you that the task takes more time than you wanted, figure out why! In the end, you need to find a balance between trust and control — and micromanagement based on a bunch of deadlines makes this task much more difficult than it should be.
Rebuilding all your management is definitely a very big accomplishment. Therefore, you can try this method as follows.
Over the next week, eliminate multitasking from your repertoire. When you are working on something, do not allow yourself to start the next project until the first one is completed. How does this affect your motivation? At your concentration? For the time it takes to complete a task? Try single-tasking, and you will surely find that it is much more efficient than deadlines and calendars.
... And be sure to write in the comments what came out of it!
It turns out that people quite often miss the deadlines for work, there are a number of fashionable philosophical reasons explaining why this happens.
And while some people are trying to focus their attention on using a lot of small planning tricks to help you consistently and timely approach deadlines, we noticed a big life hack that really helps us:
')
In our company Edgar, we completely abandoned deadlines - and you can do that too.
No deadlines?
None
We know what you are thinking now:
This idea seems very stupid.
Do not worry - your brain is configured to think so. From the moment you were assigned to do your first homework at school, you were told the time by which you had to complete it - you were always told to complete each task by a certain moment. Therefore, some people insist that nothing would ever have been completed without deadlines.
Probably from an early age you realized that deadlines are very, very important.
In a sense, this is true, but not to the extent that you imagine. Because there are things that may never have been done if they had not had a deadline. For example, paying taxes or car inspection is something you really do not want to do. You do not want to do this, so you are allowed to postpone these tasks only for a certain period of time.
But most things are not. In any case, not in your business. And the attitude towards them as an unpleasant "obliging" can lead to serious problems.
Why arbitrarily set deadlines are dangerous
Since certain tasks that you faced throughout your life had built-in deadlines, it is easy to come to the idea that everything needs a clearly defined deadline. In a sense, deadlines are enjoyable, because they give you a specific goal. You know what you need to do, and you know by what point it should be done.
In theory.
But in reality, when you set deadlines for everything you do, many of them you choose arbitrarily. A specific task does not really need to be completed by a given time - you just say you need it. So you feel that you are responsible. Which, perhaps, will not become a problem, except for the fact that not all deadlines have no basis - it is not easy to distinguish deceptive deadlines from real ones. Distinguishing those tasks that must be completed on time from those that do not require haste is rather difficult - and this is where the problems begin.
Deadlines are so often postponed, because not all of them are really needed and significant. And this means that you constantly move tasks on your calendar, trying to find the perfect way to squeeze everything into place so that it makes sense, while most of the tasks should not be there at all. What is easier to collect: a puzzle of 10 thousand. Pieces or 100?
When you set deadlines only for the things that really need them, you can freely prioritize all the other work that needs to be done on the project - and it is much easier to organize them than you might think.
How to work successfully without deadlines
Now there is one big question:
If you do not have deadlines, how do you complete anything?
Based on our experience, the workflow consists of two parts.
First: do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.
Parkinson's law says that the work will fill in all the time allocated for it - set aside a day to complete the work, and it will take a day. Give yourself a week for the same task - it will take a week. And while someone will argue that you just need to set shorter deadlines - this, too, can lead to the fact that you will be in a hurry and do work somehow to have time to complete it on time, instead of allowing her enough time and do everything conscientiously. You can wear down yourself, and your work may also suffer from this (the fact that you can do something in one day alone does not mean that you will actually do it).
Our alternative is a complete rejection of deadlines. As a result, projects take as much time as they really require, and not as much as you devote to them.
And yes - you will still be motivated to do your job, despite the fact that you have no set deadlines. The pessimistic view of Parkinson's law is that if work has no deadline, then you will never find the motivation to do it.
In this view, there is almost as much meaning as in the phrase: "You will die of hunger if you do not make a meal schedule." Your tasks will be solved, because they must be solved, and not because you have marked the date of the deadline in the calendar. If you’re worried about losing any motivation, take a look at the second part of the process: work on only one project at a time.
Even if you feel confident in your ability to do a lot of things at the same time, switching between different tasks still kills your productivity, slows down your work and causes you to work on many half-completed projects until you finish at least one through.
In our company, we force ourselves to work on one project at a time, and only when it is completed can we take on something else.
We organized our workflow according to the kanban system. It looks like this:
In the left column are future projects. Someone selects a project from the To Do list and moves it to the Doing column, starting work on this task. And when the project is ready for the next step - it moves to the right (in this case, the project of the developers moves to the stage of checking the code). As soon as the project completes its path, moving to the rightmost column (Complete - not shown in the figure), the developer can again go to the start, select a new project and repeat the cycle.
Your list of current projects motivates you not to waste time. Of course, you may have to work at the moment on what you really don't want to do. Over something boring, forcing yourself to lose faith in their own abilities, and so on. But you cannot work on anything else until you complete this part of the work - something like the “no ice cream until the porridge is eaten” approach. Maybe this phrase will seem to you something fantastic, but it turns out that the completion of the project is a reward, because then you can start working at the next level. In addition, it gives the motivation to quickly deal with a ton of small annoying tasks - those that in the usual scenario, you would be indefinitely.
Without deadlines, you can still control the work of others.
From a managerial perspective, deadlines can seem like an invaluable tool to help maintain the effective pace of your team’s work. They look like a crowd of gangsters who are called to remind people that they have certain obligations.
“It seems that you are doing a good job. It will be very unfortunate if ... something happens. "
But do you really want such an approach in your business?
Permanent deadlines can create the wrong ideas in your team. Instead of strengthening the feeling of independence, they turn workers into people who automatically perform tasks only for the sake of another tick.
If you don’t trust your team to just do your job just because it has to be done, and not because the deadline hangs over them, then you should rethink whether you hired those people.
Business will not grow if you take on team those who automatically perform tasks - business develops thanks to people who are able to come up with new ideas and collaborate with you, bringing much greater contribution than working on everything that they were told to do. David Ogilvy in his book Ogilvy On Advertising shared the advice he gave to each head of department in his agency:
“If each of us hires smaller people, we will become a company of gnomes. But if we hire big people from ourselves, then we will become a company of giants. ”
Getting rid of deadlines is not the only way to motivate your team, but it contributes to more productive teamwork and creates a climate of trust - without hard deadlines that can kill the desire to find creative solutions.
Note: This does not at all mean complete disappearance of control.
The refusal of deadlines does not entail the abolition of management - simply the management itself is changing. You have to work with people who want to do their job well, but you can still check their progress and intervene if your help is needed or you want answers when you consider it necessary. If it seems to you that the task takes more time than you wanted, figure out why! In the end, you need to find a balance between trust and control — and micromanagement based on a bunch of deadlines makes this task much more difficult than it should be.
Here's how to test it without risk.
Rebuilding all your management is definitely a very big accomplishment. Therefore, you can try this method as follows.
Over the next week, eliminate multitasking from your repertoire. When you are working on something, do not allow yourself to start the next project until the first one is completed. How does this affect your motivation? At your concentration? For the time it takes to complete a task? Try single-tasking, and you will surely find that it is much more efficient than deadlines and calendars.
... And be sure to write in the comments what came out of it!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/295336/
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