The very word 'deadline' is laced with negativity, which is not surprising when you consider its origins:
The word has morphed into a somewhat less dramatic concept, yet for many, it still incites a feeling of dread. It implies a rigid and immovable timeframe for task completion, which if overstepped has potentially damaging consequences.
Deadlines do have their place. Certain things like submissions for a competition, the printing of a newspaper or the filing of taxes need a restricted timeframe or cut off point to keep things moving forward.
Event planners know all too well the logistical stresses of a hard deadline.
Academic research has found that, when given a deadline, a complex task is seen as an even greater and more immediate challenge, regardless of when the deadline is set for.
Scientific America reported:
"Simply imposing a deadline—whether it was two or eight months away—reversed the mind’s relation between work and time. Faced with a deadline, volunteers saw difficult and complex tasks as looming all too close."
Prioritising activities around deadlines, and the inevitable procrastination a long deadline can create, can have a negative impact on our minds. Putting off tasks until a deadline, has been found to kill brain cells.
The shift in perception and emotional response to a deadline is likely to lead to additional stress, restrict creative thinking and redirect focus to just getting the job done rather than completing the task with excellence.
In reality most work has variation. Think of the operating table. A surgeon faces an anomaly during a routine operation that she needs to address or a life is at risk. Does she just stop work in progress and stitch the patient back up because she has another operation scheduled for the afternoon? Of course not, she addresses the problem, adapts, completes the surgery and re-schedules the later operation.
Or perhaps the car mechanic facing an immediately unidentifiable problem. He’ll test, repair, test, repair as necessary until there is an entire solution and the vehicle is roadworthy again. Or would you prefer to hit the highway in a deathtrap because he's time strapped?
Breaking down the process of a task into smaller, more perceptively easier stages with room for mistakes, learnings and change will surely reduce stress, allow room for creativity and ultimately result in a job done well as opposed to a job just ... well ... done.
Today the word 'deadline' still infiltrates many aspects of the business world and the creative process of content generation has not yet escaped its imposition. Should it? Yes... Yes it should.
Without some sort of time scale in place nothing would ever get done, but that doesn't mean content creators across businesses need to bend their backs in submission to hard deadlines.
In today’s digital environment, content publishing is about reaching and serving the right audiences, where and when needed, and not just about churning out to deadlines.
Publishing deadlines are a hangover from the age of print, where come the stroke of the deadline, any 't's or 'i's left uncrossed or undotted were destined to remain just so. Take the world of publishing; an environment devoted to the written word where traditionally 'deadlines' had significant prominence. It's still so easy to conjure up that image of a journalist sweating over an article in the early hours of the morning with the deadline of next day's news looming over him.
But expectations have somewhat changed when it comes to deadlines for journalists. In the age of the Internet, news content gets published digitally almost as soon as it is written. Newspapers now publish stories almost instantaneously online and provide continuous delivery of content. News websites are literally updated by the minute.
Every business that embraces content marketing faces the same challenge of creating outstanding, engaging content whilst at the same time achieving core business goals.
In response to this we are seeing more and more focus being put on agile and iterative marketing.
Just how are modern B2B marketers integrating agile principles into their content marketing strategies to drive reader engagement and ultimately reach business objectives?