Eternal deadline

When I come to a new company, especially if it is a very young and small company, I often observe trivial situations: a lot of things are done on the deadline date. You can recall such cases from your experience. And everybody knows that this doesn’t seem right and wants to do something to change it. But, surprisingly, they don’t have time for this because today is another deadline task.

These urgent tasks were planned in advance, with extra time for unexpected events. But this is a cognitive trap that we have some priority tasks for today and think we still have a reasonable amount of time for other things. To help my team handle this, we usually do day-to-day planning and leave 20-35% of work time to work on the future. And after 2-3 weeks, daily planning is optional, which becomes a habit.

Of course, for new members, such training is part of their onboarding and learning.

So remember to work in the future and leave some time not to be in a situation of an eternal deadline.