The Importance of Setting Realistic Deadlines and Expectations for Task Completion

Deadlines directly impact your future plan and strategies as they allow efficient time management and keep your business or company running smoothly. They ensure everyone works harmoniously to complete a specific task or achieve a particular goal.

However, there’s a thin line between setting realistic deadlines and unrealistic expectations. This guide explores the importance of deadlines, the effects of unrealistic deadlines, and how to set realistic expectations and deadlines. 

Why is Setting Deadlines Important?

Deadlines push you and your team to achieve goals within a clear timeframe. They help you to:

1. Prioritize Important Tasks

Setting deadlines is an effective way to ensure you complete tasks. They force you and your team to organize and finish tasks based on importance. Learning to prioritize tasks ensures you focus on objectives or milestones that produce the best outcomes, helping you progress toward the most important goals. 

Tools like the Eisenhower Matrix, Getting Things Done (GTD) and MoSCoW can help you with prioritization.

2. Clearly Define Goals

Setting a deadline requires determining the duration you allocate to finishing a particular task. It will force you to consider the necessary steps to complete a task and how long each will likely take. This thought process gives you a clearer perspective of your goals and what you need to achieve them. Additionally, using a virtual collaboration platform will make it easier for everyone to visualize their regular assignments and stay up to date with the team’s overall progress in achieving goals. 

3. Create Momentum and Motivation to Achieve Goals

Setting a precise date to complete a task can encourage you to work harder to finish on time, even if it means side-lining less essential duties. As the deadline approaches, you’ll get more motivated or agitated, prompting you to take action or move to the next step.

Positive action, no matter how small, is a step towards your goals and meaningful milestones, making the overall objective more achievable. With time, you become more confident in your capabilities and comfortable with deadlines, so the agitation turns into excitement. 

Without deadlines, there’s no direct incentive for task management that nudges you to finish the task, so it may take longer. 

4. Boost Creativity and Nurture Innovation

If your team is success-driven, they’ll take deadlines as excellent opportunities to build value or as engaging challenges. The deadlines become pivots towards success, regardless of the tasks involved. 

Tight deadlines also encourage you to develop creative solutions to finish the tasks. A well-set deadline can help your team achieve its full creative potential because the circumstances will force everyone to be creative. They become motivated to tap into their creativity to restructure and optimize workflows, allocate resources to exceed expectations, and complete tasks faster.

5. Remain Accountable for Your Goals

When defining timelines or determining the purpose of any task you need to handle, there’s nothing more powerful than deadlines. Regardless of who sets it, a deadline ensures all stakeholders are on the same page, focusing on a common objective.

By setting a deadline, you’re creating a vital metric to determine whether your action or lack thereof is a success or failure. You’re solely responsible for the outcome. 

6. Build Confidence

In most cases, setting clear deadlines increases the chances of submitting quality work on time. Constantly meeting your deadlines boosts your team’s morale, self-esteem, and confidence while guiding how to prioritize tasks. 

The Thin Line between Unrealistic Expectations and Productivity: Effects of Unrealistic Expectations

If you constantly push and criticize your team for performing better, it will be challenging for them to overcome setbacks and bounce back. 

Leaders who often express dissatisfaction drain the team’s resourcefulness, mental endurance, motivation, and creativity. 

If you’re constantly pushing the team to attain ever-rising standards, they’ll doubt whether they can succeed when faced with more significant issues. They become paralyzed instead of looking at the failure to deliver as a learning opportunity.

Unrealistic deadlines and expectations often lead to:

• Missed Delivery Dates. Having unrealistic deadlines increases the chances of your team failing to meet them. Regularly missing delivery dates raises questions about their ability and productivity levels.

• Lower Work Quality. If you have unrealistic expectations, your team will likely cut corners on the steps to complete a task, leading to low-quality outcomes and avoidable mistakes.

• Cost Overruns. Unrealistic expectations can easily lead to cost overruns. With unrealistic deadlines, your team will not deliver within the set duration, so they must work overtime to finish, adding to the total project costs.
• Mental Health Concerns. If you expect too much from your team, they’re more likely to take time off work due to stress-related illnesses. This will add even more pressure on the remaining team members, who’ll have to meet the deadlines with less staffing.
• Low Morale. Achieving targets gives your team great satisfaction. As Dr. Paul Gerhardt highlights, if targets are constantly unrealistic, your team feels like they are always underachieving, which affects productivity, motivation, self-esteem, and, eventually, your bottom line.

Tips on Setting Realistic Deadlines

When set correctly, deadlines can become a powerful tool that ensures effective time management. Some deadlines can hold you back or keep you from achieving positive outcomes instead of pushing you in the right direction. To ensure you achieve positive results, consider these insightful tips: 

1. Set Achievable Deadlines

The realism of deadlines is crucial. If your deadlines are unrealistic, they will be unachievable, creating a sense of failure. To avoid such occurrences, you need to start at the beginning and answer this key question; what is goal setting?

Understanding what goal setting means to your team, you can set realistic goals and deadlines that your team can achieve. However, this doesn’t mean setting lax deadlines that don’t challenge everyone.

2. Allow Adequate Time to Meet Deadlines

Allocating your team enough time to meet deadlines is vital. If you set a very tight deadline with strict timelines, chances are low that your team will meet them.

Ensure you set deadlines early to allow everyone enough time. It would help if you allocated everyone extra time to handle other commitments, duties, or tasks that may affect their ability to meet the deadline.

You can track team and individual tasks with Profit.co’s innovative platform to enhance productivity. The intuitive dashboard has task management tools to help prioritize tasks and manage workflows. 

3. Let Your Team Participate in Setting Deadlines

Your team should participate in setting deadlines and allocating tasks so everyone understands what they need to deliver. Doing so allows team members to pinpoint issues or raise concerns, which helps eliminate unrealistic deadlines. Scheduling regular team meetings to talk about your goals and strategies will also help make sure everyone knows what they should be prioritizing to make sure that your team is on the right track.

4. Set Clear Deadlines

Setting clear deadlines requires clarity on what everyone should do, when, and who should handle what tasks. You can leverage Profit.co to gain visibility on time and task management. It’s easy to customize task boards and workspaces for every team or department and set visibility. 

5. Maintain Continuous Communication

Regular communication is crucial to understanding deadlines. With Profit.co’s real-time dashboard, you can ensure everyone remains up to date with any updates or changes to deadlines.