Deadlines or Lifeline ?

/ JOURNAL

We are stuck goals and milestones in a modern age, where everything is moving fast and millenials are expected to meet very high expectations, with a rise in productivity tools like Trello, Asana and mantras like kanban, GTD or Getting Things Done has grown in adoption in this century due to the ever demanding need to be more productive. As Project Managers or startup founders you many have come to a situation where you gave a developer a job to do for you with an ETA only to be dissapointed with Low Delivery or No Delivery at all. This event is experienced when working with most creatives, artist, tailors, music producers, carpenters etc.

So let me ask you, Are you a deadline or lifeline person ? Incase you’re curious to find out, this comparison should help

Deadline

  • sticks to the timeline and delivers before time
  • Sticks to a particular process/strategy and gracefully follows it through

Lifeline

  • Good at emergency deliveries, tight delivery expectations
  • Hacks processes to produces optimal results, most cases short term.

This makes me reflect between Mourinho and Pep Guardiola, two wonderful personalites, winners they are, however I would categorize one as a Lifeline person and another one as a deadline person

In the startup world, you require a mix of both, roll out a feature as soon as the need arises, so that the Investors and users would be happy, experiencing the potential of that feature, without sacrificing the position of consistent iteration over a process, flow, or major release to add that grand appeal to your product.

You need processes and consistent behaviour to be meet deadlines once you have actionable goals, wheareas you could pray for miracles, or an all-star teammate to pull a lifeline.

Who are you ? Deadline : Lifeline