How deadlines impact teams?

Long deadlines increase the likelihood of teams procrastinating due to other short term priorities starting to take higher importance. It is important to present the long term deadlines in smaller 1 to 2 week clearly defined milestones to keep the momentum going. 

It is important to understand the impact of deadlines and how teams tend to generally respond to it. The tasks with longer deadlines tend to be perceived to be harder than they are even when the longer deadline is completely incidental. For example, a longer deadline could be due to an availability constraint or simply work not needed by a certain time. The perception of the task being more difficult increases the tendency to procrastinate on those tasks while increasing the possibility of the teams quitting. 

Research (Zhu, Bagchi 2018 ) shows that individuals are willing to take a lower payoff in return for a short but known expiration time on an assignment. Additionally, studies reveal tendencies that people prefer to pursue less important assignments rather than more important assignments with longer deadlines. Urgent tasks provide the short term psychological fulfillment of having completed them with the psychological safety of more time remaining to finish the long term tasks later. 

Research (Zhu, Yang 2018) shows that longer deadlines lead to longer time and money spent on work and decreases the probability of completing the task. Additionally, longer deadlines leads people to set easier goals and decreases effort while increasing perceived difficulty. 

However, in some larger and complex projects, long term deadlines are inevitable. There are several ways to deal with this:

a.    Meng Zhu in his HBR article suggests to remind team members to focus on every day activities by stressing their importance, essentially taking the focus away from a long term delivery. 

b.    Another way would be to break up long complex tasks into S.M.A.R.T short term goals with deadlines not expanding beyond 1 to 2 weeks. 

References:

Meng Zhu, Rajesh Bagchi, Stefan J Hock; The Mere Deadline Effect: Why More Time Might Sabotage Goal Pursuit, Journal of Consumer Research, , ucy030, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy030

Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, Christopher K Hsee; The Mere Urgency Effect, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 45, Issue 3, 1 October 2018, Pages 673–690, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy008

https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-we-procrastinate-when-we-have-long-deadlines