How to Enforce Deadlines
Learn how you can best get people to meet their deadlines.
It’s hard enough to overcome your own procrastination. How do you help other people overcome theirs? Different things work for different people. A magazine editor wrote in, asking how to enforce deadlines for her contributors. She gets a mix of employee and volunteer writers. This question required the big guns, so I turned to my outside panel of experts for advice.
How to Enforce Deadlines
Melvin is a super-nerd. “It’s all about being very, very clear,” Melvin says. Meeting deadlines are part of someone’s job. Deadlines should not be soft and fluffy. They’re a fact of nature. Like the fact that new vampires rise from the crypt three days after being bitten. That means if you want to have real vampires at your Halloween party on Sunday, you need to make sure they’ve all been bitten by the Thursday before. If you wait until Friday, it’s just too late.
When you hire someone to do work for you, the deadline is part of the agreement. So if you work with a bunch of writers, for example, you should check in with them once a month and review their on-time performance. Sometimes all that’s needed is for them to become aware of how often they are—or aren’t—meeting their deadline, and they’ll self-correct.
Enforce Deadlines by Making Them Public
Another way to enforce deadlines is to make all of the dates public. Bernice sends out a weekly newsletter that many other people contribute to. She’s sick of having to manage everyone’s deadlines and feels that because the newsletter is a group effort, all deadline information should be public too.
I confess, I’ve used this myself on projects. Create a public calendar prominently displayed in the office, showing due dates and actually-submitted dates for everyone. Above the calendar, put the on-time goal (100%) and last week’s on-time percentage for the last week. “We’re 80% on time.”
Note early submissions on the calendar in green ink. Write late submissions in red. Making this information public does two things. It gives feedback, just like individual conversations, and it also serves as a benchmark, showing everyone that there are some people who meet most or all of their deadlines. Of course, it also introduces peer pressure and implied public humiliation. But that’s all self-imposed, so you get all the benefits of public humiliation without actually having to build a pillory in the middle of the office and clean up the rotten fruit used to pelt the offender.
Add Carrots and Sticks to Enforce Deadlines
For more advice on how to enforce deadlines, I had to ask Europa. Europa is a control queen. Her family moved often while she was growing up. Other little girls played house, she went to the beach and played Pirates. Her favorite part was pillaging. A brief successful singing and acting career gave her the seed capital to build a shady business empire that includes most of the Eastern Bloc, which she controls through shell corporations. She’s good at getting people to deliver.
Europa explained that you must use carrots and sticks: reward and punishment. If someone misses their deadline, throw carrots at them. At high velocity, carrots hurt. Punishment can be extreme, like a rule that says being late three times in a year is grounds for eliminating a writer’s column. Or the punishment can be milder. A late column is left blank with the single sentence “So-and-so did not submit a column this week.” That isn’t even punishment; newspapers do it when regular columnists are sick or on vacation.
You can also reward good behavior by using a stick. Put a marshmallow on the end of the stick and toast it until it’s a delicious golden brown. Then put it right in front of them in all it’s gooey delicious goodness, and say, “If you meet your deadline, you can eat the marshmallow!” You’ll have writers climbing over each other to meet that deadline!
Enforce Deadlines with Competition
In addition, Europa says, you shouldtry competition. Have freelancers compete with staff writers to get the most prominent columns. If a freelancer or volunteer wants to write one and gets it in before the staff writer, the staff writer loses their place that issue.
The Nuclear Option
Lastly, there’s what Europa calls her “nuclear option.” (With her, you never quite know if she’s being literal.) Call your writer into your office. Say, “You’re fired. Your column is canceled. Fortunately, that means we have an extra slot on staff, so you can apply to fill it. Pitch me on why I should take you.” Now discuss things like meeting deadlines. That is basically clubbing your writer over the head with the fact that their job is to write a column by a deadline. If they aren’t meeting their deadlines, they aren’t doing their job and should probably find employment elsewhere.
Don’t let yourself take the burden of other people’s missed deadlines! It isn’t fair. First try giving informational feedback privately. Then try public. Then add rewards and punishments. Try competition, and lastly, make your people aware that meeting the deadline is part of the minimum job requirements, not simply a nice-to-have.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Employees image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
