Do you want to know the importance of deadlines and WHY you need to abide by them?

If so, then read on to see why you must abide by them.

Now to answer this question, I will give you the short answer and I will give you the long answer.

The short answer is this:

People need things done fast. And because they pay you money, they make the rules.

Hence, you must follow the rules.

End of story.

The long answer consists of studies and some Physics.

These 2 things will lay to silence any temptation to not have deadlines as I will explain why knowing the Physics behind deadlines will change the way you approach work.

You’ll be 100X more productive and this will allow you to achieve more things in less time.

So let’s get to it.

Why Deadlines Work

There was a study done by the Journal of Consumer Research that examined the effects of longer deadlines and shorter deadlines.

They concluded that when a shorter deadline was instituted, there was more effort put toward their goal and an increased sense of urgency.

The reason for this is a phenomenon called Parkinson’s Law (not Parkinson’s disease).

Parkinson’s law says that when we are given a task that has a short deadline, we put more effort into it and we do not relax when we are working.

Likewise, with longer deadlines, workers tend to relax since they have all of this time to work with and feel no rush to complete the work.

You might be envisioning yourself going back to your school/college days when you might have waited until the last minute to complete your project.

This is the reason this happens.

To actually prove this, I’d like to introduce you to a concept called true stress.

Forgive me if you don’t understand what I’m talking about (it’s an engineering concept), but it should make sense when I break it down and relate it to you.

A force is the effect of an object interacting with another. It will either make the other object move or stay still. This is the foundation of inertia, also known as Newton’s 1^st Law of Motion.

An example of a force is your weight, which is a result of your body’s interaction with Earth.

Another important term is the cross-sectional area. This is the area of a flat surface (typically known as a plane in the engineering world).

When a solid object receives a pull or pushes directly into it, it is what’s known as a normal force (there is also shear force, but don’t worry about that for this explanation).

The normal force forms a 90-degree angle with the flat surface.

This normal force stems from the interaction of the push or pull directly into the object.

Click here to see what the normal force looks like.

The normal force produces something known as normal stress, which is the result when you divide this normal force by the cross-sectional area of an object.

The formula for normal stress is this:

σ=F/A

σ=Normal Stress, F=Normal Force, A = Cross-Sectional Area

There are two primary types of normal stresses that are dealt with. There is engineering stress and then there’s true stress.

I’ll introduce engineering stress later in this post.

True stress is the stress that occurs when you apply the force and the cross-sectional area changes.

Typically, this cross-sectional area gets smaller.

Read that last sentence again so you understand the rest of this post.

Now when a material is exposed to too much stress than it can handle, a phenomenon known as a rupture will occur when the material can’t hold the normal force (typically a load) any longer.

With respect to your life and how you get stressed in crunch time, let me tie this in so it makes sense.

There is an interaction from the outside. It’s called your job (or your schoolwork if you are in school).

It is forcing tension on you.

Your cross-sectional area is the time that you have to complete the work, which is getting smaller by the minute.

As you can see, if you let work go untouched while this “area” gets smaller, your true stress will go up.

Hence, your sense of urgency will go up.

On the contrary, if your cross-sectional area is large, you barely feel any stress and you get to take it easy and put it off until the last minute.

But it’s only when this cross-sectional area gets small that you start working.

When stress is small, work is not a priority.

But when it’s large, it is.

Now, with you, the beauty is you can complete your work efficiently to reduce the “force” that’s applied on you.

Now let me introduce engineering stress.

Engineering stress is the stress that you get when you divide the force (in this case normal force) by the original cross-section of your material.

This is the stress that occurs when you load, say, material on a beam for instance. It can take it on initially, but then over time, there will be deformations and this stress will change (hence why materials get tested before construction).

For YOU, you don’t have to deal with the stress increasing (in most cases).

The reason is because you have the power to reduce the force you experience.

How?

By completing what you need to complete.

To do this, you need to find out how much work is manageable within the time frame to complete your work.

This might involve breaking up your work sessions by the amounts of days in which you get XYZ done in ABC number of days so you can work at a pace where you can deliver the best quality of work and you can finish on time (or sooner if possible).

Hence, engineering stress is the quotient of how much work you can complete in a certain period of time to keep it less than or equal to the true stress.

This is how you organize your day so you can work efficiently.

Know that if your true stress is too high, you won’t finish your work, and the material “your brain” will fail.

In other words, if there is too much work (force) in a short period of time (area), you won’t finish your work.

That’s the science behind why you should not procrastinate.

To make sure you don’t get lazy, you should set your deadlines so that you get something done during the day so you can maintain your engineering stress throughout the course of your project.

To make this simple for you to understand (I hope you aren’t too confused, comment below with any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them), let’s say that you have 4 days to complete 4 tasks.

Your force is 4 tasks and your cross-sectional area is 4 days.

Let’s say that each task is of equal difficulty and require equal amounts of time to complete (varying difficulty might require more time to complete tasks).

At first, your true stress is

σ=4 tasks/4 days

If you let it sit, the true stress will become this:

σ=4 tasks/3 days

You don’t want this to add up.

So when you sit down and plan out how you will complete these tasks, you’ll say this:

“OK, these tasks are of equal difficulty. I don’t want things adding up. So as a worst-case scenario, we should complete at least 1 task per day so we can finish the project on time. Today is the deadline to complete task 1. Let’s roll.”

Assuming that you are disciplined, you are taking on 1 task per day at a minimum, allowing the minimum stress you shave off per day to be:

1 task/1 day.

Now with 3 days left, your true stress is:

σ=3 tasks/3 days

It’s still 1 task per day.

But let’s say you amp it up and you complete the second task.

Now your true stress is this:

σ=2 tasks/3 days

You are ahead of schedule.

And if you keep the momentum going, you will knock out your task without the threat of over stress like this:

σ=4 tasks/30 minutes

Yeah, you don’t want to do that.

The bottom line is this:

Without deadlines, stress adds upon itself, as I have proven to you with Physics, so you can’t dispute the reality that deadlines need to be part of your plan.

Do you understand everything I just talked about?

Like I said above, please feel free to ask any questions you may have about what I covered. I’ll be happy to answer them.

This is a proven way to cut your slack really fast and to push you to get the job done in the fastest time possible.

Your fear of the negative consequences (everyone has this fear) will activate your fight or flight response and you WILL finish the task provided that you are disciplined.

It’s why you run away from a fire and run away from a gunman and, yes, why you rush to get the project done and beat the buzzer.

That’s why you need deadlines.

If you play too far with the lead, you will relax too much and you’ll most likely lose the game.

It happens too often. So don’t let that be you.

Play with a fire under your seat every day like your life depends on it.

Mentally, don’t play relaxed. Be like a guy being chased down by a mad gunman trying to steal your life.

Because in reality, if you don’t get the job done and meet the deadline, some asshole gunman (figuratively) WILL shoot you down and they will take what’s yours.

So don’t let the guy shot be you.

Control your world. For your own good.

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And remember this,

Eat or be eaten.

Until next time,

PS: Comment below with what you got out of the post. It’d be really awesome to know how this post has helped you in any way!

PPS: If you have any questions about the content in this post, don’t hesitate to ask. I am more than ecstatic to help you out! I love helping out when I can; it’s my passion and it feels good inside (do more of it when you can; you’ll thank yourself later)!