How to do great work ahead of your deadline.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an Experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So if you find yourself in that camp of people where you do some of your best work at the last minute, but you don't want that to be a thing anymore, what can you do instead?

[00:00:28] ISo I often, I still do in many cases things at the last minute, but one place where I've improved that is at work. My work is not always at the last minute anymore. I'm usually pretty good about my deadlines and about doing things early enough and not causing that extra stress for myself and for those stakeholders around me.

[00:00:56] And the reason I often do things at the last minute is [00:01:00] because I'm a perfectionist. I care about not making mistakes and doing things perfectly. So how did I fix that? Or at least how did I improve it? Because it is certainly not fixed. At work, I will take my work and break it up into tiny, microscopic little tasks.

[00:01:25] And I mean, microscopic, okay? For example, let's say I am developing a website. On this website there is a homepage. The homepage has a call to action area with a heading, some text and one button. I will make it my task to design – sorry – develop that one button. That's it. I'm not even gonna say, oh, build that call to action component.

[00:01:53] No, no, just do the call to action component button, because when a task is so small, [00:02:00] your perfectionism traits, they don't kick in. And if you wrote that task down, you also get the very nice kick from being able to check it off and, you know, you feel productive. So it's a win-win. Plus you keep making progress.

[00:02:19] The other thing I do is I move the external pressure. So a lot of people give this advice that, oh, if the deadline is on February 14th, you know, make your internal deadline be February 9th. This doesn't work because the people are still expecting stuff from you on February 14th. You can set all the arbitrary deadlines you want, but they're not gonna work because the external pressure is still on February 14th.

[00:02:53] So instead, I will tell one stakeholder, not the main stakeholder, but some stakeholder, [00:03:00] or let's say an internal project member that I'm gonna get it to them on February 9th. Now I've taken that external pressure and I've moved it up to February 9th, and then I am able to get motivated and do that work and deliver for that date instead. the very last ting that I often do with big, looming, overwhelming, scary deadlines:

[00:03:26] Like say, writing a talk for a presentation. On the day of, I will schedule a – an event for myself or an appointment, let's say, getting the tires changed on my car or the dentist, or a nail appointment, and by doing that I make it pretty much impossible for myself to be available in the last moments before a deadline, which means I have to get [00:04:00] my work done.

[00:04:01] This is also just a, another form of moving the external pressure to earlier, but it does work. Now, in the most ideal world, you don't rely on external pressure, but I think that it is a good first step and it can be a good way to manage your procrastination or perfectionism tendencies, so that you know the outcome works a little bit more in your favour and in the favour of the rest of your teammates.

[00:04:34] That's what I've been thinking about today, and I hope maybe that this helps you as well, as it has helped me.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.