Sometimes, we realize we’re the ones giving ourselves too-tight deadlines – either out of a desire to show how eager we are or because the sense of urgency makes us react too frantically. Instead of beating ourselves up for that tendency, let’s talk about why this can actually be a great thing to realize – and what to do about it!
A full transcript will appear here within two weeks of the episode being published.
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Full Transcript
Ep 91. Choking Ourselves Up on Deadlines
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today we’re gonna talk about something that I noticed about myself when I was practicing law, and lately, I’ve been hearing it echoed among my clients. And that is when we figure out what we, ourselves, are the ones choking ourselves up on some of our deadlines. Now, I’m not talking about all deadlines. Obviously, there are a lot of deadlines out there that are crazy tight, and those are what they are, but there are some, usually some without a hard external deadline, that we still come up with some sort of deadline internally, usually it’s established with other people, sometimes it’s just established with our ourselves that are really, at the end of the day, tighter than they need to be.
And in my opinion, a great thing about that is that when something is “our fault” and we can kind of feel that kind of self-judgment blame that we did that to ourselves, what I want you to think about instead is that means it’s in my control, which is awesome news. Because on the time management front, so much is out of our control that it’s really awesome to find places where things are in our control even if it feels like it’s our fault. Just a neutral fact, it’s in our control, which means that we can make changes unilaterally and change the outcome just by changing our approach. We don’t have to have conversations with other people. We don’t have to get buy in. We don’t have to get permission. We don’t have to do any of that. We just change our own approach, and our breathing space can increase as a result. And that is awesome news. It doesn’t happen enough in time management, and so, when we find it, let’s pounce on it and make the most of it.
So let’s first discuss kind of the how and the why this happens, when this is happening so you can issue spot it for yourself and then how to change it.
We Want to Show We’re Eager – 2:20
In terms of the why, I think there are kind of two main buckets of things that I see. The first is we offer a date that’s really fast to show our eagerness or to show we’re really enthusiastic to be there or that we’re a big team player or however you want to think about it. It’s that feeling that, my guess is we all know, where you’re like, “I’m just gonna show them I’m really into this by saying I can get it to them by the end of the day or tomorrow at noon or by the end of the week,” or whatever it is just to demonstrate that eagerness. And this was very much me as a young associate. I realized about two years in that I was really burning myself out because I was establishing deadlines that were really tight to show that I was really good at my job. And it makes sense.
I mean, I think that we often come into the workplace and because we don’t know a whole lot about the organization, about how things run, perhaps about how to be in a certain industry, like when I came into my first law firm, it was my first job as a lawyer. I hadn’t really been a lawyer before, so I couldn’t contribute to the degree that really maybe stood out on strategy and knowledge and creativity yet. And so, my real distinguishing feature was my speed. I could do things fast. I could help them out by being fast and being always available and all that kind of stuff. And so, the approach makes sense. We just kind of hold onto it longer than it serves us because as we get older, now that you are familiar with the organization and how things work, this substantive work that you do, your thoughtful, strategic, creative work product is impressive also. That is great, great value, and so, that’s when we just have to be aware of speed is not the only way to show enthusiasm and value. Instead, we really can bring great, thoughtful, brilliant work product to the table even if it takes more time, and that shows us value.
I just want to point out here that also rushing can undercut that value of being the thoughtful, creative, strategic person. Rushing can actually undercut the strategy and the quality of the creativity that you bring to the table. So it’s not just even, hey, speed is valuable but so is strategy and creativity. It’s also strategy and creativity requires time and speed undercuts it. So sometimes by choking ourselves up, we actually, obviously, hamper ourselves of delivering the value that, really, we can bring to the table as a more senior or even mid-level person. And that’s just something that’s important to keep in mind. And I raise that just for a way to help talk yourself into this different approach and feel good about it is you still are bringing strategy to the table, and if anything, you are bringing the strategy that they want from you and the value that they want from you to the table over the speed that actually might be undercutting your ability to actually do your job really, really well.
An Unnecessary Level of Urgency – 5:23
So we’re gonna talk about how to shift gears in a second. But I want to also address that second bucket of why this can happen, because sometimes it doesn’t really feel like an eagerness thing, but there is still that level of urgency. We feel a level of urgency when we get an assignment and, as I said, sometimes that is the case. That urgency is a good reaction to the reality of the situation. But something I’ve noticed, more so lately, about myself is that sometimes I have that urgency when the reality actually doesn’t require it. It’s actually not that urgent. It’s like the fight or flight primitive part of my brain responds to things with urgency even when there’s no actual real need for urgency there, and if that happens to you, then (I mean, I think it happens to a lot of us) that explains the kind of knee jerk like, “I’ll get it to you fast,” because we’re feeling that urgency. But if the reality doesn’t require it, then we don’t need to get it to them as fast. And that’s just an important thing to kind of realize.
I think I’ve shared this before, but I often notice it about myself in the morning of doing so many logistics with the kids. I finally get the youngest to daycare, which is my last stop. I’m able to drive home, and I just have this rushing feeling, and sometimes I’m like, “Kelly, you don’t actually –.” Yes, I want to work. Yes, I have plans. Yes, I want to be at my desk at a certain time. But it’s gonna be okay if I’m not. And sometimes the way I’m operating and the stress I put myself under cannot reflect that reality. And I think sometimes we do that at work where we get an assignment and we feel like, “I’ve got to get this to people fast,” and so, we state a date two days from now that we need to get it to them when the reality is they didn’t need it in that period of time, and I think we just need to remind ourselves sometimes to maybe take a second look at when we think something needs to be done from a more calm place.
This might seem silly to some. I really find taking one deep breath, as deep as I can, holding it for a second, and then filling up more — I can’t remember where I read that. It’s definitely not my idea. But it really helps calm my nervous system. So you take a deep breath, hold, and then fill up even a little bit more, and it is weird to me how much it calms my body.
Now, I know you can’t necessarily do that in full in a meeting with someone else when you’re trying to set deadlines, but to the extent you can do anything, whether it’s deep breathing, more subtly perhaps, or things like that, just even trying to calm yourself down before you respond with dates and things like that, that could be great. I’m kind of little bit jumping ahead into how do we build in this breathing space for ourselves, but when we’re talking about urgency and calming ourselves down, I also just want to point out (I’m gonna say it again in, like, two minutes) that you don’t need to also establish the deadline in the meetings in real time. I think that, as any client of mine will know, that the amount that we actually have in our calendars that reflects where our time is going is very complicated. And so, you don’t need to pretend that you have all of that memorized. I mean, that’s the whole point that we do it in our calendars.
But even to somebody else, you don’t have all of your projects, all of your workloads, all of your deadlines memorized in your head. And so, if you in those moments need to say, “I think I can get this to you in, like, a month. But let me check my calendar, and I’ll just get back to you later today or tomorrow about when to really expect that,” that’s a totally fair response. I think that it’s just like if someone challenged you on it, because sometimes we don’t operate in that way, I think you can say, “You know, I’m juggling about five different projects right now. I just need to make sure that with meetings and deadlines coming up that I’m giving you a date I can stick to and deliver a great work product.”
Okay, so just to recap where we are right now, I think that why this happens comes down to a want to show eagerness, which makes a ton of sense. And I think to counteract that, we just have to remind ourselves that, especially as we get more senior in our positions, demonstrating enthusiasm, the only way to do that is not speed. There are smart, strategic, thoughtful things we can bring to the table that show our interest and our value that don’t require speed and are maybe undercut by speed, and so, we can help ourselves shift out of that. And then the second one is that urgency and just trying to calm our bodies down to realize this is not a fight or flight situation, that we can build in more space into it in a way that will give us the breathing space that we’re looking for.
I’m sure there are others. If you have another reason where you tend to kind of realize that you choke yourself up on deadlines, and again, no judgment. I did it a lot. I still do it sometimes. Really, if you want to reach out to me and let me know the why, that would be really interesting to me. I love thinking about this stuff. But for now, we’ll shift into, practically, what do we do about it. We realize this. We know we want to take a different approach. What does that other approach look like?
How to Build In Breathing Space – 10:35
So pick and choose what works for you. It’s all kind of related, but maybe a little bit random too. So pick and choose what works for you. When I realized this about myself, I was, I think, maybe a second or a third-year associate, and I’d been doing the eagerness thing for a while and was just realizing I was burning myself out and then suddenly was like, “Where are all these deadlines even coming from?” and realizing, “Oh, they’re coming, often, from me. I am choking myself up.” What I started doing is, first, I realized that part of my pattern had not just been just trying to show eagerness. It was also, in relation to that, I would try and think about what I had on my plate the next day and a half and shift some things into the night, shift some things into the weekend, perhaps. I really started just taking any available time, and I would rearrange my work into that time.
And so, one thing, just a good starting place, is as you come up with your deadlines, do not factor in working nights or weekends to make it happen. Again, I’m a realist. Some of our work requires that at times. But not all work does. And so, challenge yourself. If this is something that does not have a hard deadline, like you’re doing some research, or you’re putting together a presentation, but the presentation date hasn’t even been fully set, or it’s, like, three months away or whatever it is, there’s no actual hard deadline in play, then as you come up with your own deadline, just be sure that you’re not factoring in the time that you do not want to be working into that.
And so, that was the first thing I did. And then that worked fine. I would be like, instead of tomorrow or by the end of the week, I would say, “I think I can get it to you by next Monday or next Tuesday.” And they’d be like, “Great!” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That was so easy!” And so, then I started adding a day and a day, and I just started padding my time of when I said I would work. And often, it was like, “Great!” And it was a weird moment of — that was actually the harder part for me is to realize how much I’d been choking. By adding in all this time and still having the answer be an enthusiastic, “Great,” that part actually showed me how much I’d been doing it. So if you feel that way, I get it. But hopefully just take the going forward benefit out of this and don’t judge yourself looking backwards.
And I will note that sometimes there was pushback. Sometimes they would say, “No, I really do need it by the end of the week,” or “I need it by this date,” and often it was helpful because I would learn why. That helps sometimes. Not always, but sometimes I would be like, “Oh, can I ask why? Is there something going on?” And then that would help inform even the research or whatever I was doing to understand the timeline. It actually sometimes gives more context.
I’d also just point out that sometimes there was pushback even if I didn’t find out the context. It usually was far later than anything I’d been originally offering. So just don’t let the pushback discourage you from pushing out farther because you’ll probably still end up with a date that works really well for you and that was later than what you’d been offering. And on the whole, I think you’ll find that you’ll get what you request, I don’t know, I’m gonna guess 80% of the time, maybe 90% of the time. And that really emphasized when I was going through it that, at the end of the day, people really just want good work. They don’t want to do it themselves. They want to be able to rely on you in it. And it needs to be somewhat in a timeframe. But the timeframe element is looser. They don’t just want speed; they want good work. And that can look different ways to different people, but speed is not the only determining factor.
And, I mean, it goes back to what I was saying. Speed’s not the only way to add value. It just was a little bit of a lightbulb moment for me when I was going through it, so I figured I would throw it out there. People want good work, they want to rely on you, and they need it in a certain timeframe, and that’s really what they’re looking for. And so, you can use that to inform the deadlines you give, and speed is not the only way to do it.
Also just as I alluded to, make sure you’re prioritizing your own health and happiness in these deadlines, to the extent you can. Again, I know it’s not every deadline. But for the deadlines, you probably know what I’m talking about, those looser ones that are just not as hard-deadline driven, prioritize your health, prioritize your sleep, prioritize your ability to work out and make meals and take care of yourself mentally and see friends and spend time with family and all of that because, it’s so cliché to say, but our careers are a marathon. They are not a sprint. And we all have enough sprint periods that we need to protect the more marathon pace the rest of the time.
You Don’t Need to Choose a Deadline in The Moment – 15:19
All right, another thing I wanted to raise here was also, and I talked about it before, is you don’t also need to decide in the moment. Let’s say you’re still doing it. I talk about the whole “let me check my calendar” thing more to punt the decision of whether to do a project. But let’s say you’re already in the project, you’re already getting the assignment, all that kind of stuff. You could have conversations around, you know, “When do you need this by?” or “I’m thinking about getting it to you by this date. How does that sound?” things like that. You also can get that information and say, “That sounds great!”
Let’s say you say, “When do you need this by?” and they say, “I think next Wednesday would be great.” You can say, “I think that’s doable! Let me check my calendar, and I’ll get back to you about timing if there are any issues.” And then just an action item you have today or tomorrow is check your calendar, maybe dig into it a little bit first (the actual assignment), see how much time you think it’s really going to take, maybe spend 20 or 30 minutes starting it, and then you’ll learn more about how long is this gonna take, add in that wiggle room, and then reach out to them. “Yep, next (whatever day) sounds great!” or “Actually, as I’ve dug in, I’ve realized that it’s actually gonna take longer because of XYZ. If you agree that I need to do those things, I think I probably need until next Friday.”
Again, they might push back, but they might not. They might not have realized how much work it takes, and I think just making visual the work and showing someone that you thought of it thoughtfully and kind of just remind them of what goes into something, it helps people understand time management themselves and helps them help you decide what they need to do. Because they might prioritize speed and not need you to do XYZ that you thought, or they might need those things, and they’ll agree to Friday.
So I think that’s a really valuable one that a client actually raised yesterday is just the reminder of you do not need to decide in the moment. You do not need to have all of your workload, all of your deadlines, how it all comes together memorized in your head and be able to answer it live in a meeting. You can just kind of see, “Hey, I think that this works. I need to get back to you before I confirm.”
Calming The Other Person Down – 17:31
Another point here I wanted to raise is the need sometimes to calm the other person down because the same feelings we experience around, whether it’s eagerness or, often I would imagine in this situation, the urgency feeling, can be experienced by the other person as well. And this comes from a different client and it was years ago and it always just sticks with me because I think it was such a great response. When she would push out a deadline, do the things we’ve been talking about, and the other person kind of frantically would be like, “No, I need it now! I need it now!” she would say to them, “Okay, is there an external deadline I need to be aware of? Because I’m just trying to manage my own workload in relation to some other things, and I just want to make sure that if I need to prioritize this, I will, if there’s a true external deadline we need to handle.”
I think what’s great about that approach is that it just kind of calms the other person down a little bit. It takes the emotion out and instead of like, “Is there an external deadline we need to be aware of?” and if that person realizes, “Yeah, actually, no, there’s not,” then it helps calm them down, which buys you time for the deadline itself, which is awesome.
Don’t Ask; Make a Statement – 18:37
The final point I wanted to raise here that is a little bit more theoretical but has practical implications is a nudge to you that, as you get more senior, just state the timeline that you’re going to deliver things on or that you’ll need, even if it’s later than the initial ask. Don’t ask. Just state, “Okay, given the scope of what we’re looking at, this is the timeline that I can deliver this in.” It’s gonna depend on work culture and team culture and all of that, but I do think that we, as women, need an extra push to experiment with this approach, and essentially, a push to step into our roles as leaders, as adults, as women managing our own time, as women bringing our own judgment and expertise in our specific industry area to the table and saying, “Great, if this is the project you want, I need this much time because it takes this much,” and it’s not a question. It’s just a statement.
Sometimes we just need to take it and own it and not just always ask for permission. And so, that’s obviously relevant at different stages of a career. You know, I’m not advising any first-year associate to take that approach, or a new entry-level person to take that approach. But you know who you are. If you are really feeling like you can step into your expertise a bit, if it doesn’t feel inappropriate — it might feel scary. But if it doesn’t feel inappropriate, just a little bit scary to try it, I would encourage you to try it and own that as well.
Recap – 20:15
Okay, so just to recap these, one is push out your deadlines as much as you can. Experiment with it. You can always go a little bit, baby step it out if you want to, know that there might be pushback. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing to do. You’ll probably still end up with a better date on that project and definitely across the board on all of your projects. And at the end of the day, people want good work that they can rely on in somewhat of a time frame. They do not need just speed.
Point two is you don’t need to decide in the meeting. So feel free to take your time there. Point three was calm them down if you need to with the question of, “Is there an external deadline I should be aware of?” And point four was state it. Don’t always ask for permission for things. At a certain point, just try to step into stating what you need with your value and judgment and expertise that you bring to the table and just own that a little bit more. If that’s not you right now, consider calendaring it out when you think it might be (in a year, two years, three years), and just remind yourself to step into that spot, and you can always experiment with it and see how it goes.
All right, I hope that helps! It really is a great thing in the time management field when you realize something is “your fault,” because it means that it’s in your control and you can change the outcome just by changing your approach. So really be on the lookout for areas like that spot when you’re doing this type of thing we’ve been talking about, and then intentionally change your approach in the ways that we’ve discussed.
If you have any other ideas on this, I would love to hear it! I think this topic is really, really interesting. As I said, it doesn’t apply to every project, to every deadline, anything like that. But I think it applies more often than we realize, and it’s really pretty fun and freeing and kind of activates that experimentation part of my brain in a fun way to see how to solve it going forward, and I hope it does for you as well.
If you enjoyed this, I would absolutely love an Apple Podcast rating and review. It really means a lot to me and helps other people find it, and feel free to share with a friend as well! All right, thanks for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
