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I’ve written about the idea of deadlines maybe once or twice before — here and here come to mind — but as I’ve gotten older and worked with more people, it’s something I’ve understood less and less. Let me outline a few quick things here:
The Friday Deadline: This I perhaps understand least of all. If it’s Friday 11am, I maybe get it a little bit more. But Friday EOD usually means something isn’t getting looked at until Monday afternoon — after the rush of early Monday — or, in all reality, Tuesday late morning. Why rush a person into a deadline of Friday, potentially getting less quality work in the process, if you know no one is going to look at it on Friday? At my last full-time gig, this exact thing happened one Friday when I was supposed to meet my ex-wife for happy hour. Ended up at work till 8pm, and of course, no one reviewed the thing until Tuesday. That’s why “employee experience” kind of sucks. You won’t fix that with software.
The Road Map Issue: Because lots of companies worship Silicon Valley and general tech stuff, we get into this issue where everyone is using “sprints” and “road maps,”which can make deadlines seem intractable — because if you miss one, it pushes out the next stuff. The biggest flaw in the “road map” world is that if you manage a road map shittily, which many companies do, all you do is get shit work all over the road map because…
