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You Don’t Have to Wait

Many people in business school have interesting ideas. They have companies they want to launch. Projects they want to get started on. Jobs they want to apply to. But often times, they don’t pursue these opportunities right away. Instead, they wait until the the final days before taking action. In some cases, it makes sense because they are good timelines to follow but often times, people only follow them because they are there. So they get busy and don’t take action until the very end. Well, in such cases I propose the simple idea that it might be worth starting sooner. That you don’t have to wait.

One thing I’ve learned from being in graduate school is that things get busy and we have deadlines for everything – homework assignments that are due, job applications that we submit, and agendas for our clubs and other campus groups. So we put a lot of things on our calendars, get dozens of reminders a day or two before these things are due, and we only finish some of them right before the deadlines.

The same is true in the professional world as well. We set up dozens of meetings in a given week and promise multiple deliverables to clients and internal team members.  As a result, we fill our days with other activities to keep us busy while we adhere to these timelines that have been set up.

But what if we all asked ourselves the question: can we speed up the date that these things are due? Why don’t we take action sooner? What if we work on our deliverables before we are expected? Would the results be better? And the product be higher quality? After all, the best companies on the planet do that quite well. Consider Apple.

I see the same thing happen all the time in business school, where we find ourselves using the days before the deadline as an incentive to finally make progress. Especially on things that have a high initial learning curve.  But I’d argue that taking this approach may not always be the best one.  Doing it this way means you have less time to get feedback. Less time to think about your strategy. Less time to make revisions. And in the end, less time to produce a quality work product.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect deadlines, and adhere to many of them myself. Especially the ones that I don’t have control over. And the ones that are well-timed. But in many cases, I don’t know if we always need them.  That instead these artificial dates hold us back.

Today, I face this same challenge as I think about the timing for my new website. I wonder when the site should be fully launched? When should I finish my business plan? And when should I tell more and more people about the project?  As I think about the timing for all these questions, I hope that I can take action faster. But in some ways that remains to be seen.

In sum, don’t wait. Get started now. Ignore bad deadlines. You might be better off in the end.

Hopefully I am too.

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