Date and Deadline. Know Your Enemy
Work And Study Productivity / / December 23, 2019
Whether you work for yourself or uncle, anyway you have to deal with the timing of delivery of projects - Deadline. They are one of the main sources of stress. Darrell Etherington proposes to classify them, to make it easier to deal with them.
The first type: White Polar fox
Quite often, especially in large companies due date - one of the most important indicators of whether you will be able to work at all on the accepted standard. Fail the time - and more luck is not shining.
There is nothing you can do about it - you can only tighten and do everything on time, while not forgetting about the quality. If no period is long enough, you will certainly need to set ourselves milestones, even if the client does not require regular progress reports.
The second type: Rigorous yet flexible
It sounds contradictory, but it is not so. It is in this category and will get most of the terms that you will encounter in your life. They set strict, but always can see the changes if circumstances arise, other duties, other arrangements.
To work successfully in this situation need to understand where did these requirements for the timing. Perhaps they are dependent on you due to the work of other groups, or the promise of senior management. In this case, they are quite strict, as you know. If the period is determined on the initial estimates of labor costs, then you can consider them more flexible - for error-free evaluations practically does not occur.
The third type: Timing? What are the terms?
This is not in the general deadline approaches, it's just a date that was set, and then completely forgotten about the problem. You can also forget about those dates, unless of course, someone important not remember it. No, I do not encourage you to do the work, just need to understand that in this case, you'd better do something with a higher priority, because even if remember about this task - you will have a list of successfully completed and more important tasks.
Deadline - not cinematic monsters, they may simply mean that the client would like to get something and then something to such and such a date, or even that there are rules, saying that such a task should be performed no longer than they are due.
The Deadline Game: Three Types [Darrell Etherington]