What Turns Estimates into Deadlines

It may be a sign of my bad head cold, but my first thought on seeing this headline was "'What' is a terrible name for a piece of software"!

I approve of the general idea proposed, but it's hell on other people. Sometimes the advantage of a deadline is that it forces you to choose what will and won't make it into version 1.0 (or whatever). I speak as a serial "when it's done" offender who is always finding 'one more cool optimization that just happens to need a big rewrite of a whole chunk of the code' - exasperating for those around me.

Tl; dr:

The very act of sharing an estimate verbally creates a some weird social deadline. Author proposes deadlines should not exist.

Agreed, I briefly entertained the idea of adding deadlines to the distributed PM-software (https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis) I'm writing but decided to nudge evolution in the right direction instead.