Want to Be the Office Hero? Stop Being Deadline-Vague

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard the deadline “end-of-day is fine” or “tomorrow” or “later” or “next week”in the workplace I would no longer need to be in the workplace.

I am convinced that fully one half of workplace conflict can be traced back to time. Time at work, time it takes to do something, time the work is due, time it takes to review and move the work forward, time in and time out. Time of when work is expected. The deadline. And for something we see out to the hundredths decimal point countless times every day (“what time is it? 12:34:05,” “he won the race by .02 seconds,”  “the “2 minute drill,” “she’s got  8 seconds on the shot clock,” “the flight leaves at 12:04,”… i could go on) we are TERRIBLE at using time to our advantage in our communication in business.

And this is exacerbated by the generational differences around the concept and use of time and the technologies available to us today to go right up the very last second of opportunity in how we experience time today. That the concept of the day has been stretched to its actual limits, has created conflict and therefore inefficiencies and waste around deadlines.

For example, when I went to college (back when I had to walk to and from class through the driving snow, barefoot, uphill both ways – well not the barefoot or uphill part, but I did go to college in Minnesota), assignment deadlines were either a) at the beginning of class or b) 5 PM on a specific day. Today, on college campuses all over the country, 11:59:59 PM is the most common timestamp required on the digital submission assignments. Because it’s still the due DAY, and email and cloud services provide the ability to deliver work virtually.

Or, the 9-5 (really the 8-5) workday, which came into being out of 1940 Amendment to the The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which basically codified “End of Day” to 5 PM. ( You can read great articles about modern workday by Katherine Goffeney on Quartz here and Shana Lebowitz on Business Insider here.) Until, let’s say 2000, “end-of-day” meant 5 PM. And while the truth about the 40 hour work week for white-collar workers reveals its fiction, the concept of end-of-day meaning 5 PM for a large portion of the managing workforce is still alive and kicking.

I could fill 10 pages with examples of vague concepts actually implying hard deadlines, but you get the idea.

These generalities around time that used to be specificities in our work culture, get us into trouble. Because it’s incongruent with the 11:59:59 PM reality college students are used to as their “end-of-day.” Because we work with teams, partners, customers, and clients in different time zones – so whose “end-of-day” is it?  Because, with a flex-time schedule, where parents may go offline for three-to-five hours in the late afternoon/early evening and log back on to work until late in the evening to get things done, 5 PM is no-person’s land. You can read more about deadlines here   and here.

End of Day Doesn’t Exist

Stop Giving Vague Deadlines

When is later? Later actually never comes.

When is Friday? What side of the International Date Line are you on?

When is Next Week? What national or bank holiday schedule do you have?

When is End of Day? Whose day? Today’s short day or tomorrow’s long day?

And because in our culture of 100ths of a second, end-of-day, later, next week, Friday are all nebulous, and leave a window wide-ass open to interpretation. This, in turn, leaves us all open for disappointment and frustration, missed deadlines and, ultimately, profit.

From a management point of view, the worst thing you can do is issue a directive where your employee can be right and wrong at the same time. Technically, the end of the day is 11:59:59 PM, but if you meant 4:30 PM when you said “end of day” because that’s when you’re leaving today, your employee delivering his work at of before 11:59:59 PM in whatever time zone he’s in is technically correct, even if he’s contextually wrong….because YOU didn’t give him the context he needs to fulfill the expectation.

Be a Deadline Hero

Want to be the hero in your office? Stop being vague and start giving deadlines with hyper-specificity. What time, on what DATE, in what time zone. Instead of “tomorrow,” specify tomorrow, Friday, March 2, at 3 PM Pacific.” Yeah, you might feel like a tool for being so exact, but everyone will know EXACTLY what you expect and your chances of getting what you want when you want just increased 95%. If you’re the one giving deadlines, your JOB is to be clear, and in today’s distributed work teams working in different time zones on different schedules, being exact is what counts and what helps all teams work better together.

It was a lot easier in the days of walking barefoot through snow uphill both ways.