The Only Deadline that Means Anything is “Today”

July 21, 2011

We all get too carried away with setting deadlines on tasks, either explicit or implied—and then we feel bad when we don’t meet them. I feel we should use deadlines much less often, and we should even avoid implied deadlines—like that implied by a “daily task list.” Otherwise we are breaking “promises” all day long and we lose respect for our own abilities. The reason? Priorities change too fast to schedule deadlines for everything.

For example, it feels proactive for us to create a long list of tasks that we are “going to do” today even if they’re not absolutely required today. That’s what most people do—they call it their daily tasks list and it creates an implicit deadline of today for everything on the list. But then we all feel regret when, because other more important things pop in that day, we finish only a few of the original tasks. And so each day we push the incomplete tasks forward to the next day, and when we do that day after day, we feel guilty—like we are not meeting our expectations.

All of this comes from getting carried away with deadlines. In my opinion, the only deadline that has any real significance is what’s absolutely due today. Why?  Because things change too fast. Urgencies come and go. Priorities change, interests change, realities change. So, in my opinion, the only date that is really a reliable deadline is something that you know, and have confirmed, is absolutely due today. Everything else should be considered only as a candidate for today, but not something you’ll beat yourself up over.

And that’s exactly what the MYN system allows. It has a category, called Critical Now, which sits at the top of the list. You only put items there that are absolutely due today—they are so critical you would work till midnight if not done. Nothing else goes in that Critical Now list and it is very short. You rebuild that list each day since it empty at the end of each day. And then you put everything else is a general “start this week” group (called Opportunity Now), or in a “start next week or beyond” group called Over the Horizon. You then pick from those lists after critical things are done. It’s simple, it works, and you don’t beat yourself up every day over false failures.

Now, of course you’ll have some projects that may have true deadlines coming up that you need to plan ahead on. And certainly you should attend to those deadlines in advance. But such cases are usually the exception rather than the rule. Most other to-dos become a flexible mass of changing priorities, morphing from day-to-day into new goals, imperatives, emergencies, and so on, all based on the changing nature of your business. So I say, rather than beat yourself up over deadlines that became meaningless later, recognize this nature of work and adjust your to-do list accordingly. That’s what the MYN system does. It sorts tasks into their appropriate urgency zones and gives you a way to track them appropriately. Start using it today.

Michael