The Surprising Magic of Setting a Deadline

Mar 9

Mar 9 The Surprising Magic of Setting a Deadline

Deadlines are incredibly crucial for those of us with ADHD. Just think back to the last time someone told you to get something to them "whenever you have a chance" - Well, when did you actually get it to that person?

I have a friend I work with occasionally, and he often gives me this line because he knows I can be busy with family and other obligations. In his mind, he is trying to not push pressure on me, but without that deadline, it can be hard for me to even get started. So I have to stop and be like, "no, give me a date, it doesn't matter when it is, just something because otherwise it just isn't going to get done. I don't have a spot on my calendar for whenever."

The other important piece of a deadline here is it allows me to define the scope of my work. You've probably heard the adage that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion." This is known as Parkison's law. The idea here is that regardless of the amount of time you have for a given task, that is the amount of time it will take to complete that task. It's counter-intuitive because we think how long a job takes is static. But thinking back to all those papers I wrote in college, I can see the wisdom in this idea. If I had 4 hours to turn in an essay, then it would take 4 hours. If I had 5 then I'd use 5.

What I think is an important corollary to this is that when you cut down on the time you have, you have to cut certain things out of what you are doing. For papers, this might mean I'm spending less time researching or less time writing out an outline. Since I no longer have the time to dally, I have to pick what's most essential and work from there. In a more practical sense, when I'm giving myself a deadline, it requires me to distill my work to its most essential parts.

Think about cleaning your house for an upcoming dinner party. Suddenly you've got a deadline to get your house cleaned up. While it's been a goal for a while, you're actually doing it now because you don't want anyone to know how you actually live, but you don't have time to completely Martha Stewart your house. You've got to pick and choose which places in your home need to be the cleanest and most made up. When I'm cleaning, this means getting all the kid's toys off the floors, having clean bathrooms, and getting the table and counters cleared off. This also means I'm probably going to be piling some stuff in boxes and hiding them in the closet. In an ideal world, I'd have the time to completely deep clean my house and be the imaginary person who lives like that - but I'm just not going to get it done if I don't have that time pressure of a deadline.

The most important factor of a deadline is that it has to be relevant to you or to the project. Deadlines can't be arbitrary.

At work or school, deadlines are easy to hit because there are clear consequences to not hitting them. If I turn in a paper late, that is going to affect my grades. If I don't get a podcast out on time, I'm going to be letting some people down.

Unfortunately there are a lot of things in life that don't have deadlines attached to them. At first, this can feel incredibly freeing - ah, I have all the time in the world to work on this project. But after a while, you find yourself not working on your project at all because, well, you've got all the time in the world to work on it. There is no time pressure to finish your project, and so those things in your life that do have time pressure behind them come first.

So we go about setting deadlines for ourselves... and well a Douglas Adams quote comes to mind here, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

We make these arbitrary deadlines and hope that we'll stick to them because they at least have a date attached to them now. But when all you've got is a date with no consequences, then you don't actually have a lot to go on.

A recent example I can think of for this is trying to get my garage organized. This is something I've wanted to get done since I moved to my current house two years ago. I've set multiple goals to get it organized - and each time I set a date of when I want to have it done by. And yet over and over again, those dates have flown by. My garage remains a mess. I have the desire to clean it, I'm just not able to make it a priority.

There are a few reasons I'm never hitting my deadlines on my garage. First, I've been doing a lousy job defining the scope of the project. It's hard to get started on something so open-ended. It would do me a world of good to define what having an organized garage would look like. What needs to happen for me to reach this goal? But of course, that only leads to the ideal world situation we talked about earlier. Sure, I could plan out on how to turn my space into Tony Stark's garage, but that wouldn't help me on the execution side of things. My bigger problem is that the deadlines I keep setting aren't relevant, and when I don't hit them, nothing happens. Without consequences, I can put off that project forever.

Let's think back to our dinner party example - we may have had a goal to get our house clean for a month, but suddenly with the dinner party, our cleaning has a relevant deadline. While our friends would understand if our house was messy, we still want to clean up. None the less I'll feel embarrassed if I don't get to it. We're just trying to create some sort of reason behind why we want to clean, and we've set a time that it needs to happen by for it to matter. And I think that last part there is the importance of relevance. If I miss the deadline and clean my house after the party well, who cares? When we make those deadlines matter, then we are a lot more like to follow through with them.

And we don't just have to make deadlines matter by giving them consequences. We can also look at creating a reward system for hitting deadlines. Sometimes looking forward to a reward for hitting a deadline is a lot more motivational than thinking of some sort of "punishment" you are going to receive. This can also just come from reframing your thoughts. Instead of "I'm going to be embarrassed if my friends see my messy house," it could be "I'm going to feel so much better with a clean house when we have the party." Same consequences, just another way of looking at them - it just depends on what motivates you the best.

A great way to create that relevance is through some sort of accountability. I talked about accountability teams in Episode 9: Compassionate Ass-Kicking For The Win, and you can check that episode out for some tips on why I believe accountability is so important.

Accountability can work great with following through on deadlines because it helps create stakes that are outside of your head. When I was in college, I was taking a short-story course with my girlfriend (now wife), and we'd often edit each other's stories. This meant that I had to finish writing a story early enough to give her time to edit it. And so I finished a lot of work for that class early.

When we're setting up these forms of accountability, we want there to be some sort of consequences (good or bad) if we don't follow through with our deadlines. If nothing happens when we don't meet a deadline, we quickly learn that it doesn't matter - but also remember that our consequences don't have to be dire either. If I don't have my house clean when guests come over, then I suffer through a little embarrassment. We've got to take into account that we have lives and that we're talking about things that we want to complete. There are enough regular ol' deadlines in our lives that have crappy consequences; we don't need to be adding to the pile.

Of course, our relevant deadlines are a double-edged sword, while the threat of consequences will usually spur us into action, we're still going to miss deadlines sometimes. I'm not going to pretend like the idea that a deadline exists is going to supersede everything else my ADHD has to offer. Despite my desire to always hit my deadlines, sometimes life happens. From sick kids to the internet being out to just forgetting I needed to complete something, there are a lot of reasons that deadlines might get missed.

One of our biggest problems comes from not setting realistic deadlines. If I told you I was going to produce ten brand new episodes by the end of the week - well first, you should just laugh. That's way too much. That's just an unrealistic goal - I mean maybe if I didn't sleep and I neglected my family, and I absolutely didn't care about episode quality, I could pull it off - but not worth it.

Back in college, I started participating in something called Nation Novel Writing Month - or NaNoWriMo. The idea of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel during November. Despite numerous attempts, I've never finished a NaNoWriMo. In my defense, it has been a few years since I've attempted. But my lack of success mostly came from poor planning on my part. When I see the 50,000 words, I go, "well, there are 30 days in November - so if we just divide, we get about 1,666 words a day."

Pretty straight forward right? Well, that doesn't take into account that November is actually a pretty busy month and I might not be able to write every day. Let's just Thanksgiving as an example. If I can't get away to write those 1,666 words, then I should lop that day off my calculations, and while we're at it, we should lop off two more days for travel.

This gives me 27 days of writing and shoots my daily writing target from 1,666 to 1,851. While it's only about 200 words a day that's added, those words add up over the month. By the time I hit the end of November, I'm going to be short if I don't find a way to make up for what I've missed. And since I wasn't accounting for any of the other days I might be miss, this usually meant that I'd find myself one weekend saying that I was going to be making up a ten thousand word deficit.

And that's possible - I've definitely written 10,000 words in a day before. I mean, I churn out first drafts of these scripts in a few hours, and these are usually 2-3 thousand words. But I don't want to put myself in that kind of hole. It isn't helpful to the process.

The point here is that creating reasonable deadlines is about understanding what's already on your calendar. If you create a timeline that doesn't account for the time that you are unable to work on a project, then you are always going to find yourself behind. Something always comes up. Always. I can't think of a single project in all my life where everything went exactly as I originally planned it.

We don't know what's going to come up, but we can still add-in that buffer to our plan solely for the fact that we're going to screw something up somewhere. We've got ADHD, mistakes are going to be made, but hey that's okay, they usually make things more interesting.

So deadlines are about putting your planning into action. Without deadlines, we can procrastinate forever because it isn't the right time to start. And without realistic deadlines, we're never going to be able to hit our due dates. Sometimes that's okay because we just need a target, but more often than not, we want to make sure that we're giving ourselves the time we need.

Realistic deadlines require us to address the scope of the project that we're working on. But this can be a real issue with ADHD due to time blindness. When we don't know how long something is going to take us, it is tough to set any meaningful deadlines.

In Episode 2: Timing Your Day, I outlined the basics of correcting time blindness by timing things and figuring out how long they are actually going to take us to do. But when we're working on our deadlines, we've got to work on chunking our projects. When we give ourselves smaller parts to work on with their own timelines, we aren't blindsided when the project deadline sneaks up on us.

In the novel-writing example from before, I needed to write about 1,666 words a day in November to hit 50,000 words. That daily total is chunking the goal down into what needs to happen every day - but I think we can do better.

I can also use this process by say breaking that goal down over the 4 weeks of November. This will mean setting a weekly goal of 12,500 words. I like this a little more because I can have a little trouble with daily goals. ADHD tends to be all about being consistently inconsistent, so as much as I'd like to have daily routines down pat, that's just real hard for me. So the advantage of breaking this out into those 4 weeks is that I can use those as milestones on my way to my bigger goal.

Instead of letting myself fall behind I can use some form of accountability to set weekly deadlines. If two weeks in, I know I'm falling behind, I can take a look at where I need to be making up some progress. Setting these milestones is a vital step in meeting those farther out deadlines. If I'm not breaking up my project into smaller pieces, it is going to be harder to track my progress. With these mini-deadlines, I'm able to make sure I'm making the right amount of progress to hit my more significant deadline down the road. Of course, all these mini-deadlines need to have the same kind of relevance that our primary deadline has. If we are just arbitrarily setting dates for those, then we are going to run into the same problems that we'd see with more significant deadlines.

This Episode’s Top Tips

Time pressure from deadlines allows us to focus on the tasks in front of us and distill our work down to the most important parts.
When setting deadlines we want to make sure that they are relevant to either us or the project. A great way to do this is through accountability and getting someone else to check in on your progress.
Deadlines need to be realistic if we plan on meeting them. Time blindness can make it hard to know how long something is actually going to take, but if we break down our projects into chunks we can work on hitting milestones with mini-deadlines.