We live surrounded by deadlines. Everything has to be done by a certain date and time; packaged up and shipped out the door.
What’s your next action? Cross it off the list and move onto the next thing?
Shipping is important
Seth Godin has hammered the point home in Linchpin. Great artists ship. No matter what your product is, if you don’t get it out the door – no one can use it. It might as well not exist.
Some people get hung up here. Procrastination visits early, indecision settles in midway through, and doubt creeps in towards the end. Deadlines can slide as new features are added and the hopeless quest for perfection turns a great idea into a rusty anchor around your neck.
Perfection is important
If you’re building rocket ships or nuclear power plants. If your job involves crash test dummies, by all means, take your time. We’ll all wait.
If you’re in marketing… lives are not at risk. Give yourself the license to play and be creative. Challenge yourself to always do better.
Deadline doesn’t equal death
Software companies get this. Version one is never the final release. In fact, we’ve become accustomed to a nomenclature that infers progressive improvement. Version 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 … The dot means “to be continued”.
Think about how many of your deadlines are dictated by antiquated technologies, processes or ideas. How can you think more like a software company… how can your ideas “be continued”.
Your website is in beta
This is the most obvious example. That shiny new website you just rolled out? Slap an imaginary construction-worker graphic (circa 1997) on your pages, because you should always be under construction. Pay attention to analytics, pay attention to user feedback, pay attention to new ideas and test them. Websites are made to iterate.
Avoid last pages and final scenes
In the world of traditional media, there was little opportunity to make changes. Your brochures went to print. Your spot ran during the Super Bowl. Shipped. Over.
Why should a brochure ever end? Are you letting a printing schedule hold you back from telling great stories? Can you really say it all in one 30 second spot?
Think of ways to complement “traditional” media – the kind with hard deadlines and difficult revisions – with your new “to be continued” mentality.
- Revise digital brochure PDFs even after version 1.0 has gone to print. As long as specs and details are accurate, people are most likely not going to compare and complain about content differences.
- Add regular email campaigns to continue the storylines you created in your product brochures.
- Create a channel of videos to either replace or support major video marketing initiatives (think Old Spice)
- Use applications (iPhone/iPad/Android/Kindle etc) to push the most relevant, new, important, interesting content directly to your consumer, avoiding the deadline death of printing processes altogether
When you infuse iterative culture into the process, deadlines stop signifying the death of a project – they simply become markers from which you can benchmark and measure your evolution.
A nice byproduct of the process is that deadlines might stop threatening to be the death of you as well; unrealistic expectations of perfection are lifted, replaced with the liberating feeling of creativity and endless possibility.