You Don't Need More Time, You Need More Deadlines

In a post about recent life lessons that Codie Sanchez shared on LinkedIn, she said “You don’t need more time, you need more deadlines”, and I think she’s right.

I mean getting more time would be great… Theoretically it means we’d be able to do more research and run through more revisions to prepare something. And you'd think that means we we’d be able to do more things with more capacity. 

But let’s be honest… If you had extra time, you’d just do more of what you’re already doing with the time you already have.

You couldn’t reasonably expect anything different. So if that means you already spend too much time putting out fires or scrolling on social media, you’d fill the extra time with more of the same.

If the goal is to get more and better work done, the stronger intervention would actually be to decrease the time you have to do it. The constraint would squeeze out the waste. We value what’s finite, and having a limited amount of time would make us use it more wisely.

The best way to manufacture that is by imposing deadlines, and that’s for a few reasons:

1) Instead of having an indefinite amount of time to do something, you create your own constraints. This operates as a forcing function that requires you stay focused on only what’s most critical.

2) It makes you push things to completion. Rather than spending so much time tinkering in your work, undoing and redoing efforts to try and get something from 90% to 95%, you must accept that your finished product will be imperfect. In that way, you waste less time doing redundant and low-leverage work so that you can transition to doing something more valuable.

3) As an extension of that, just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean that you sacrifice quality. We each have our own internal standard for what we put out into the world. That means if we have less time to do something, we’ve simply have to get to a higher level of quality faster. And when that’s the task we get more creative, resourceful, and direct to meet levels of output that we’re unwilling to compromise on.

What if it were that easy? What if rather than being a victim to Parkinson’s Law (which states that our work will expand to fill the amount of time we’ve allotted to doing it), we use it to our favor and compress our workdays into more intense, impactful, high-quality sprints?

It’s worth a try isn’t it? Set a deadline for yourself, actually enforce it, and see what happens.