How to Think Beyond Today’s Deadlines
Your brain prioritizes immediate rewards over future benefits. This makes you react to deadlines, pressures and urgencies. You sign up for work that isn’t part of your goals, you entertain adhoc requests and you try to fix a production bug while fearing another deadline that’s due tomorrow. You rush from one task to the next, try to keep up with the high expectations and meet the commitments you promised to fulfil.
This keeps you reactive—always responding to what’s right in front of you instead of pausing to think about the big picture. Urgent work consistently crowds out important thinking—it keeps you busy by completing a task, checking an item off your to-do list and feeling a temporary sense of relief. It gives you a sense of progress without expanding your skills. Your work is less impactful, hardly thoughtful and does not get noticed.
Being stuck with today’s priorities also prevents you from embracing future opportunities. When you’re too occupied meeting deadlines, you don’t notice the opportunities that might advance your career. Lack of time also prevents you from identifying where your skills might be valuable and how you can contribute beyond assigned tasks to do more impactful work.
It’s easy to get caught up dealing with everyday mess at work leaving the future unplanned and unhinged. When daily chaos pulls all your focus, you may fail to think strategically and act in ways that aligns your long-term goals with short-term actions.
Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big.
― Benjamin P. Hardy, Be Your Future Self Now
I have made this mistake over and over again many times in my career where I have used the excuse of being overburdened by my current commitments as a reason to not plan my future. You don’t have to repeat those mistakes. You don’t have to limit yourself. By building the habit of thinking beyond current tasks and deadlines, you can align your present with your future.
You can fulfill your commitments without being overstretched. You can build new skills and sharpen existing ones. You can take on additional responsibilities that are aligned with your strengths. Big picture thinking can enable you to evaluate the consequences of your decisions and make choices that are inline with your long-term goals.
You don’t have to carve out extra time to do this. You don’t have to lock yourself up and force yourself to think critically. By making small changes in your daily thinking habits, you can achieve significant results in your future.
Anticipate challenges
When you’re rushing from one deadline to another, you don’t take time to plan for the obstacles and challenges in your path. You consider the best case scenario without planning for the worst. You ignore the risks that might make your current strategy infeasible and force you to reevaluate your options. You keep executing your plan until you hit a roadblock.
Unexpected challenges and unknowns you never planned for can confuse or upset you. Being unprepared can overwhelm you. You may feel completely knocked down and find it hard to recover from the setback. You may make decisions you later regret.
When you don’t take time to think through the challenges you may face, even a small hurdle can feel like a major stumbling block. Every small thing that doesn’t go according to the plan adds to your trouble. More time and effort is required to fix unexpected issues. More rework to navigate the uncertainty. You may miss deadlines you worked so hard to achieve.
When planning a task or a project, instead of considering only the happy path, prepare for the bumps in the road:
What are the assumptions you’re making?
What issues might come up later?
What can make this project fail?
What risks have you not considered?
Do you have a plan B?
Working backwards from your destination and imagining everything that might go wrong along the way gives you an opportunity to plan for them upfront instead of reacting to them when they show up. It also does not tax you mentally and emotionally because you’ve already gone through the exercise of imagining issues that might break your momentum and derail your progress.
The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation. Because the only variable we control completely is ourselves.
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way
Think beyond the deadline by thinking about the journey to get there. Consider the ups and downs, highs and lows and victories and failures. Build a future that’s intentional, not circumstantial.
Identify opportunities
When you have a packed agenda every day—do a few meetings, fix some bugs, make some decisions and add some new features—it’s hard to think about where your skills can be put to better use or when your abilities need to be expanded. You keep doing the work that comes easy to you without stretching yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone.
Staying busy with assigned work makes you overlook unassigned opportunities—a new project which can help you build team lead skills. Architecture and system design opportunity for a new initiative that can enable you to own a system end-to-end. Opportunity to attend stakeholder meetings where you can learn conflict handling and negotiation skills. You may miss many of these unless you take the initiative to identify them and convince your manager that you’re ready to take on bigger and better responsibilities.
Managers are busy with hundreds of things to do and leaving this decision to them may not be in your best interest. Partnering with them by understanding what challenges they’re facing and how you can contribute can enable you to find the right opportunities for yourself:
What are their biggest pain points?
What new initiatives are being kicked off?
What are the low hanging fruits?
How can you ease out a little bit of their workload?
Aligning your aspirations with the right opportunities requires continuous interest in your manager’s work life. You cannot expect them to give you work that does not exist. But by understanding them better, you can contribute more than just the assigned tasks. You can request specific assignments, be part of new initiatives and sign up for work that can help you expand your skills. Actively seeking the right opportunities also makes you come across as someone who’s interested in their own growth. It builds trust.
If you want your boss to adapt to you, you must be willing to adapt to her as well. Are you ready, willing, and able?
— Mary Abbajay, Managing Up
Chasing the next deadline won’t get you in front of the right opportunities. You need to work closely with your manager to find work that aligns your interests with their plan—look for win/win opportunities.
Consider long-term consequences
When completing a task is the goal you adopt, you get wired for quick thinking and fast decisions. You consider the problem right in front of you and find the easiest way to get it done. Ticking an item on your list creates instant gratification—it gives you a dopamine hit and a never ending cycle of quick fixes and short-term thinking. You face a problem and apply the first solution that comes to mind without considering its long-term consequences.
Stress and anxiety to complete the task can make you avoid a better solution because it takes longer to complete. Worry that you’ll not meet the deadline can make you apply shortcuts and skip critical reviews. Considering only the next step without taking a larger view makes you miss the impact of your decision into the future—issues keep repeating, systems don’t scale and more time is spent in rework than building new systems.
While making decisions, optimize for long term gain at the cost of short term pain. Think about:
How can you make decisions with positive outcomes compounded in the future?
Is this decision attractive only because it has an immediate effect (first order consequence) positive?
What can be the potential downside of this decision and its effect later?
Thinking about the future is uncomfortable, but embracing this discomfort can make you get past many avoidable problems. It can enable you to push aside your short-term thinking and consider the implications of your decision into the future. By analyzing each task, every problem from the perspective of its second and third order consequences, you can train your brain to give up short-term rewards in favor of more long-term growth.
Failing to consider second- and third-order consequences is the cause of a lot of painfully bad decisions, and it is especially deadly when the first inferior option confirms your own biases. Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you’ve asked questions and explored.
— Ray Dalio, Principles
It’s tempting to give in to good outcomes with small upsides that are easily accessible and visible to you without weighing in on the potentially large downside of your decisions in the future. Doubt what may seem like an obvious choice. Seek hard truths.
Implement the feedback loop
The biggest mistake you can make when running behind deadlines is to not learn from the process. You may stop paying attention to the feedback and continue running on autopilot. Not pausing and taking these signals into account prevents you from separating behaviors that are helpful from the ones that are damaging to your own growth and those of others.
You may not see the gap between how you view yourself and how others perceive you. You may become so hyperfocused on your own wants that you may not see what others need. You may push too hard for your own ideas while ignoring alternative perspectives and differences of opinion. Without the process to know how you’re doing, you can’t improve. You can’t learn from your mistakes. You can’t do better.
Designing a better future comes from reviewing your past, making corrections in your present and repeating this loop often so that you are constantly learning and becoming a better version of yourself:
How do others feel when they’re around you?
Do they feel safe to communicate and collaborate?
What are their concerns?
Can you separate signal from noise?
Getting quality feedback requires curiosity and giving up your default urge to defend your stance. It requires putting your own ego aside and paying attention to other people’s thoughts and feelings. You don’t have to act on every feedback that comes your way. You don’t even have to accept that it’s true. But, you definitely need to do some soul searching to identify the useful parts, even if it hurts.
Feedback is valuable information about where one stands now and what to work on next. It is welcome input rather than upsetting verdict.
― Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback
Honest feedback paints a true picture of where you stand right now. It gives you a direction on the steps to take in the future. Take it seriously. Implement a feedback loop.
Anticipating challenges keeps you from being blindsided. Identifying opportunities keeps you from being overlooked. Weighing long-term consequences keeps you from repeating the same fixes. Listening to feedback keeps you from standing still. They don’t require extra time or a separate process, just small shifts in how you show up to work everyday. Stop working harder on what’s right in front of you. Occasionally step back and take a look at the big picture.
Summary
- Deadlines keep you reactive, not strategic. When you’re always responding to what’s urgent, you trade long-term impact for short-term relief. Being busy isn’t the same as being valuable.
- Anticipating problems is cheaper than reacting to them. Working backwards from your destination and imagining what could go wrong lets you plan for setbacks instead of being blindsided by them.
- Opportunities don’t find people who are heads-down. You have to actively understand your manager’s pain points and initiatives because no one is more interested in your growth than you—spot it, ask for it.
- Fast decisions favor short-term comfort over long-term gain. Training yourself to weigh second- and third-order consequences is uncomfortable, but it’s what separates decisions that compound positively from ones that require rework.
- You can’t improve without a feedback loop. Reviewing your past, correcting your present and repeating that cycle is what turns intention into an actual future-self worth building.
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