How to deal with deadlines and burnout
October 2024
Deadlines are an interesting topic because they can be both a catalyst and a stress inducer, depending on how you use them. You need to be careful and set the right balance. You want your to avoid burnout, and you want your team to focus on the next delivery.
This article explores why deadlines are useful, and explains ways to mitigate burnout while keeping the deadlines.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
Why deadlines
Work expands to fill the available time
Working without deadlines can work, but it usually tends to cause the ‘search for perfection’. The ‘search for perfection’ is the state your teams enters when they only care about doing the perfect thing. Trying to achieve perfection is an aspiration, but most of the time what you need is just the good enough. And you might find it difficult to find an example where perfection is better than just good enough when you don’t have infinite money.
That’s one of the reasons why many of the agile methodologies are based on iterations. By time-boxing the work to be done, which is essentially having a deadline, the team needs to focus on what can be done in that iteration, and starts delivering regularly.
When done well, it’s magical. You get to a sustainable and predictable pace, while delivering value constantly. That’s the end goal, and everyone should aim towards that. It’s just that you have to get there first.
While getting there, it’s common to find the following problems:
- Your team is missing deadlines. Your iteration is never completely finished, and things move over to the next iteration. Stakeholders are not happy and they put more pressure on your team, which is already down for not meeting the original deadlines. This can easily lead to burnout.
- Your team is hitting deadlines by overworking. This is totally against the sustainable pace, and it’s the principal cause of burnout.
- Your team is hitting deadlines by cutting quality. This makes the developer experience (DevEx) worse, which in turn makes the team work more difficult, which leads to burnout.
Burnout
Burnout is a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion
Burnout is bad. You want to avoid it in your team at all cost. Firstly, because you care about you colleagues. This is important, you care about your colleagues and that’s already enough reason. If for some reason that’s not enough, burnout also leads to lower quality, slower delivery speed, and higher turn over.
Now you have a problem. Your end goal is a sustainable pace, and for that you need deadlines. You also want to avoid burnout, and if you fail to set your deadlines correctly, you are increasing the likelihood of burnout in your team dramatically.
Different ways to avoid burnout, in your team, derived from deadlines
Slow down
Reduce the work in progress and stabilise the priorities for your team.
The recent 2024 DORA report highlights unstable priorities as the main cause of productivity loss and burnout.
Take your time and think about your team priorities. What do you want to focus on this iteration? Once you have decided that, be strong and protect those priorities until the team completes them.
In practice, this means that work in parallel isn’t allowed. If you have a crisis, stop the iteration and deal with it. Crisis are rare, so it’s ok to stop everything.
Do less
You have a fix time, set by your deadline or iteration. You also have a set of features to deliver. if you don’t change your deadline or your scope, the only thing that can change in order to release is quality. This is a mistake. Cutting quality is pushing your problems further in the future.
The only way out of this is by being ruthless cutting scope. Understand what is a must and what is not, and act accordingly. Focus your team on the must features first, and leave the rest for later. That way, if you get to the deadline, you can release with all the must bits and some of the rest bits, which is much better than delivering everything with a lot of bugs.
Take scope seriously and work with your stakeholders on reducing it as much as possible.
Take a break
Have cooldown periods from time to time to break from the constant pace.
This might seem incompatible with the sustainable pace, but the main idea here is to allow your team to work on unplanned work driven by them. There is no other stakeholder involved in this break, except if your team wants to involve them.
That’s all!