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Summary

<aside> 💡 Overall Thoughts

The Deadline Effect is an interesting book, as it’s not one I’d 100% recommend to everyone. But I do have pretty clear thoughts on it. On one hand, I have to commend Christopher Cox for going out and doing truly original reporting for this book. I’ve read a lot of books in the self-development space, and a lot of them basically coast by, quoting Kahneman and Tversky and re-hashing case studies from famous experiments.

Instead of doing that, Cox actually went down into the trenches, talked to people in several industries and saw first-hand how they deal with tight deadlines.

On the other hand, The Deadline Effect is very light on actual synthesis of the techniques being used. I’d say only about 5-10% of this book is dedicated to breaking down the deadline techniques and packaging them into easily-applied prescriptions.

The reason is that Cox seems far more interested in reporting than synthesis. He’s much more eager to tell the stories of the teams he spent time with, and so that’s what the majority of the book entails.

For this reason, I’d only recommend reading the book if you enjoy reading. The reporting itself is well-done and the stories are engaging, but since the focus is on them the vast majority of the time instead of on synthesizing ideas or quoting studies, it’s not like your typical pop-psychology personal development book.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Main Takeaways

1. Deadlines can be used to spur action and hone focus, but when used as a blunt instrument they also cause stress and panic, and can cause work to be rushed, sloppy, and full of mistakes.
2. To use deadlines to their fullest potential, you need to employ some smarter deadline design tactics.
3. Create checkpoints or interim deadlines en route to the final deadline. These ensure steady progress all all points, instead of a mad dash at the end.
4. Plan right-to-left - establish the main deadline, then work backwards to plan checkpoints using established data about how long each project phase will take. Stop treating tasks as “novel” - most have been done before and thus offer data on completion time.
5. Set soft deadlines with “teeth” - i.e. deadlines that have true rewards or consequences, but aren’t as consequential as the “true” deadline. Example: a soft open at a restaurant with friends and family as (paying) guests.
6. Focus on what matters; push aside everything that’s trivial. (Connection to Cal Newport’s advice to avoid the “Any Benefit” approach)
7. Hit your deadline with time to spare, then revise, revise, revise. Opportunity for repeated revision is what separates the merely good from the truly great.
8. Interdependence tends to strengthen a team’s ability to meet a deadline. The more team members rely on each other, the greater the deadline’s pressure effect.
9. Set specific, difficult goals. People tend to be more successful when goals meet these two criteria. (Ensure that “difficult” requires stretching capabilities, but is still possible within given constraints).
10. Leverage stochastic deadlines - AKA “deadlines” that could happen at any moment. When you’re aware of a stochastic deadline, you’ll be more likely to ensure you’re ready to meet it at a moment’s notice. </aside>

Book Notes

Introduction

• 2006 - US census worker Elizabeth Martin created experiment.

  • Two groups of US citizens were sent a census packet with the same deadline
  • One group received it one week later - giving them 7 fewer days to complete it.
  • The group who received it later had a 2% higher response rate - and made fewer errors
  • For each percentage point raised in mail-in response rate, government saves $75 million in expenses incurred in sending people to knock on doors and get responses in person. So this result, if implemented nationwide, could be worth $150 million in savings

• Deadline origins

  • In Civil War, the “dead-line” was a line drawn around the stockade. If a POW stepped outside it, they’d be shot.
  • Greek words about time - chronos and kairos. Chronos is the “regular drumbeat of existence”, the normal flow of time. Often depicted as an old man.
  • Kairos refers the “opportune moment”, the time to strike while the iron is hot. Kairos is always depicted as youthful, sprightly.

• Book main ideas

  • Deadlines are incredibly powerful motivators.
  • Deadlines can be manipulated.

• Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir experiment (you can’t write a productivity book without citing Tversky. It’s illegal.)

  • Offered students $5 to fill out a long questionnaire and return it.
  • Group 1 had 5 days, Group 2 had no deadline.
  • 60% of deadline group finished; only 25% of the no-deadline group did.

• Kiva - loans for low-income entrepreneurs

  • Only 20% of businesses that began application finished due to its length and complexity
  • Kiva sent reminder emails - again, one group had a deadline, one didn’t.
  • Businesses that received a deadline were 24% more likely to complete their applications.

• The dark side of deadlines

  • “The problem is that as soon as you set a deadline, work tends to get delayed until right before time expires.” This is the deadline effect.
  • Negotiations are often subject to the deadline effect. According to paper by MIT economists:

  “A firm deadline is often imposed upon negotiators in order to prevent them from dragging out negotiations indefinitely. Ironically, such deadlines themselves sometimes entice parties to delay the agreement.”

  • Deadline effect is why so many agreements are reached “on the courthouse steps.” I am reminded of all the stalled government budget meetings that threaten a government shutdown.
  • According to academics, the deadline effect is powerful but usually harmful.
  • Last-minute negotiations are typically worse for both sides.
  • Term papers written at the last minute are often unpolished and full of errors.

• FDA approvals and deadlines

  • In 1992, Congress gave the FDA deadlines for approving new drugs.
  • FDA developed a huge backlog of applications - and approved many just as the deadline was approaching.
  • 2012 study found that those “deadline drugs” were more likely to need additional safety warnings, and were more often removed from the market

  “Safety-based withdrawal is 6.92x greater for a drug approved in the two months leading up to its approval deadline than for comparable drugs approved at other times.”

• Many organizations have figured out how to leverage the deadline effect without the negative consequences. They are “deadline manipulators”.

  • Each chapter of the book follows one (or sometimes two) organizations in many different industries to see how they use deadlines to their advantage.

• Procrastination - the reason deadlines are useful and/or needed

  • We are time-inconsistent and present-biased. We underestimate both the costs and rewards of something the further it is into the future. This is called hyperbolic discounting.
  • Not just a human phenomenon - rats shown to prefer a larger, more painful shock later to a smaller one now.
  • We also overestimate how much time we’ll have in the future.
  • Shu and Gneezy cake experiments - two groups given a voucher for a free slice of cake. Group 1’s expired in 3 weeks, while Group 2’s expired in 2 months.
  • Group 1 - 50% expected they’d be able to use it, 31% did
  • Group 2 - 66% expected they’d be able to use it, 6% did

• Cox posits that:

“There’s another approach...that doesn’t put quite as much weight on the prospect of curing human fallibility. It’s a way of amplifying our self-discipline by externalizing it.”

• This is the approach I’ve been following pretty much my entire adult life; hence my interest in this book.

• Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson in “Procrastination and the Extended Will”:

  • Cognition is not the firing of neurons in a vacuum. It is the interplay of the brain, the body, and the environment.
  • Most can do multiplication with paper; few can multiply 3-digit numbers without it.

  “When trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the difference between ‘person’ and ‘person with pencil and paper’ is vast.” - Heath & Anderson

  “The self-controlled person is usually seen as one who has a capacity to exercise tremendous willpower, not as one who is able to organize his life in such a way that he is never called upon to exercise tremendous willpower.” - Heath & Anderson

  • My motorcycle safety instructor said something that ring familiar here: “We use expert judgement to avoid being forced to use expert skill.”
  • In productivity-speak, we must use expert environmental design and externalization to avoid being forced to use expert self-discipline.

  “There is not much we can do, using our ‘onboard’ resources, when it comes to controlling procrastination. When one moves into the domain of the environment, on the other hand, especially the social environment, the set of available strategies becomes less constricted.”