🔋 You Should Miss a Deadline
I'm growing more comfortable with missing deadlines, and I think you should too.
That's probably a weird thing for a CEO to say. Borderline unprofessional, even. Deadlines make the world go round, no? If we all gave up on hitting deadlines, the gears of society would surely halt! Where does it end?!
That last punctuation mark, by the way, is called an interrobang. Fun little trivia for ya.
I'm a self-professed productivity nerd. I love the feeling of being on top of things. I struggle when I'm adrift or when I don't have a handle on what all needs to get done. I literally teach on how to set priorities and build systems that help accomplish tasks.
And yet, a critical part of my evolving conception of getting things done has been letting go of the very obsession of getting all the things done.
Most things in life are not the extreme — the zero or hundred percent. Even things that appear to be at the absolute ends of the spectrum rarely are.
Take your phone battery. Throughout the day, it'll report that it's somewhere between not charged and fully charged. But if it says it's 100%, is it really? Well, no. It's 100% of the total available charge, which is not the same thing as it's original capacity when it came off the factory line. The health of the battery has degraded, and it can never again be fully charged as it once was. And on the other end of the spectrum, when it reports zero, is it actually zero? Almost certainly not. Some lithium ions are still firing in, there just aren't enough to power the device.
Nearly everything exists in that gray (grey?) space between. You and your capacity to get things done is no exception.
Subscribe for Tuesday thoughts from the crossroads of humanity & productivity
If we think about getting things done on a spectrum, where one end is getting nothing done and the other is getting everything done, we can deduce that every single person is somewhere between those opposite poles. Slouch though you may feel, you've probably never had a day where you accomplished zero tasks, and productivity zen master you may believe yourself to be, you've never had a day where you checked off every productive thing you could have conceivably done that day.
It's humbling to miss a deadline. It feels wrong, especially for those of us who pride ourselves on task accomplishment and reliability. But not all deadlines are created equally.
The trick is let go of things that are less important. The less important it is, the more you should be ok with letting it go.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a staple of modern productivity dialogue. There are many insights to draw, chief among them that you need to be able to maximize time in the "important but not yet urgent" zone. As time passes and deadlines for important things draw closer, they become more urgent, and should be higher priority.
The only want to make space for "important but not yet urgent" is to cut down on tasks that aren't important. Those are the deadlines you should feel comfortable missing. With enough practice of letting go of those unimportant deadlines, you'll start wondering why they were on your task list in the first place. It'll start to feel good to say no.
We have 4,000 weeks on this earth. We literally don't have time to fixate on unimportant things, so knock it off.
This does not mean you should only focus on important work tasks! Important, in a three-dimensional productivity sense, very much includes important parts of life like being with family, traveling, hobbying…whatever fulfills you as an individual. Those things are squarely in the "important but not yet urgent" zone, and they deserve your attention.
Look at your task list. Are there some deadlines on unimportant tasks you can proactively let go of? Do they need to be done? Or at a minimum, can you move them to a list somewhere else that doesn't require your regular and immediate attention?
Miss a deadline, will ya?
Drop me a line and let me know how it goes. The comment box below is always open.