Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

I agree but also I don't. Deadlines, and their close cousin goals, are but an excuse to stop working.

You either hit the deadline well in advance, in which case you can sit on your hands and still consider it a victory. Or you miss the deadline and you have failed and might as well give up. Or -- the worst case -- you can tell far in advance that you will miss so you don't even bother.

Compounding the problem is that we often aren't even in full control of what can make or break the deadline, so it becomes a lottery that, whatever the outcome, awards us with an excuse to stop working.

It's valuable to know the cost of time, though. There ought to be better technologies for this than deadlines.

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I've tried to think of ways to quantify this but not arrived at anything useful. The best method I know is to explain to an expert that "I didn't ship today because the product is still missing X which is necessary for the customer because Y", and then the expert can tell you off if you're wrong.

In fact, you might get far even when striking out the expert. An "I didn't ship today because" journal might be useful on its own.

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In contrast to other comments here, I don't think this is really about people needing different sorts of motivation, but more about excplicating the cost structure of the trade-off people make when they trade time (delay shipping) for... something else. This is a hidden cost which I believe frequently is larger than people think.

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And of course, time itself is an abstraction here for the benefits one get from shipping earlier, like faster feedback, less variability in release size, etc.

I couldn't disagree more:

> You either hit the deadline well in advance, in which case you can sit on your hands and still consider it a victory.

Why would you sit on your hands? You feel tremendously satisfied that something was easier than expected, and look forward to moving onto the next thing earlier than expected.

> Or you miss the deadline and you have failed and might as well give up.

No, it's not failure at all. A thousand times no. You just realize you were too optimistic with your deadline, and you set a new one based on your new knowledge. Why would you give up?

> Or -- the worst case -- you can tell far in advance that you will miss so you don't even bother.

Again, just set a new deadline! Except in this case it might be too far out and you already discovered you were bad at estimating it, so break the task into a few chunks and just set a deadline for the first one.

At the end of the day, deadlines as motivation do work for some people, because instead of a task feeling scarily too-big that you don't know when you'll ever finish it, it encourages you to break it down, and compare your progress each day with what you expected to get done, because you now have a measurement stick. It turns things from unmanageable/scary/anxious into manageable/"I can do this"/confident. And you can (and should) reset the deadline if/when you learn that the task is much larger than expected.

The point isn't to meet the deadline or else you're a human failure, a million times no. It's just a tool to set a realistic goal and measure progress against something.

And realistically, you'll probably only make 50-70% of your internal deadlines like these, and that's the sweet spot. If you're hitting 95% of deadlines, they're too lax/easy to really motivate you. While if you're hitting 5% of them, they're way too strict/optimistic. The point is to be a healthy challenge.

Also to be clear, the article (and my comments) are about internal deadlines for motivation, not external deadlines at work.

I we are arguing the meaning of the word deadline at this point.

According to my dictionary, it's not really a deadline if you can just move it as soon as it seems inconvenient or out of reach.

I think maybe Lucas Costa calls those things preemption points. It's a time decided in advance against which you check your progress and assumptions, but with no connotations that work must be complete by that point, which is strongly implied calling it a deadline.

The alternative to deadlines is consistency. Do something every day, mark it off on the calendar, if you do it for 6 to 12 weeks, it's a permanent habit, move on to the next habit you want to form.

Isn't that just a recurring deadline at midnight? You still have that binary nature, except on a smaller scale.

I think you're onto something, though: in order to get an effect, we need to drill down to the daily, ongoing practises. We can't do it at a zoomed out, results-level view.

A habit is something you’ve done so often that you don’t need to think about it. Your brain can shut down into zombie mode and it’ll still happen. This is different from a deadline at midnight which is about ramping up stress to get your brain into a hyper-aware mode, opposite of zombie mode!

Absolutely. The idea is to eliminate the effort entirely - you really want to start extremely tiny, with the smallest step, and build on that.

No, typically it's not at midnight, it's more situational - when I do X, I also do Y. For example, check the oven is empty before you turn it on, water the plants every time you refill the cat's water, do a stretch every time you walk to the fridge, unload the dishes while you make your coffee, etc.

So is it "every day" or not? If it is "every day" how do you decide that you have missed a day?

If I did X, but I did not successfully do Y. Every once in a while missing is not a huge deal, but if you see consistent issues with performance it's time to try something else or choose a smaller habit to start with and work your way up. It's often at a greater frequency than a day, I just think it's easier to track if at the end of the day you make one checkmark.

No, a "recurring deadline" means that on the classic project management tradeoff of scope-time-resources(+quality?) you consider that a fixed scope MUST be delivered by a fixed deadline, and any variation means that you may (have to) spend more effort or dump quality to achieve that; but a "recurring habit" is an approach that you devote a certain systematic amount of effort+quality by the deadline but expect some variation in how much results will be achieved that.

I worked that worked for me. Tried to form habits for years like the neurotypical I'm not

I don't see it this way at all. The PM sorts tasks based on prerequisites and availability of resources needed to complete them. Deadlines are the times a task has to be done by to not block other tasks that have it as a prerequisite. If you achieve it well in advance, you note to bring it up in a performance review and pick a new task. If it's behind, you don't give up, people are waiting on you now.

You have a far more nuanced view of deadlines than most people I've spoken to. It sounds like you think of deadlines as a cost function where the cost of something not being done is zero until a particular date, then rises more and more as more time passes beyond that date.

That's a much more useful perspective than "it doesn't matter if it's done and suddenly on this day it becomes super important" which is what a deadline implies to me. (For concrete examples of this binary type of deadline, think of releasing something at a conference, or handing in an essay in school.)

That's a fair point, I definitely think closer to the second paragraph in terms of presentations etc. Different analysis than project work for sure.

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