Written by: Michael Neill, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
What do Stress, Pressure, and Deadlines Really Have to Do with Productivity, Performance, and Results?
Over the past 20 years, I have written and/or contributed material to a dozen bestselling books and over 1000 blog posts. And until a few years ago, there were two things I could absolutely guarantee would be part of my process.
First, I knew I would make my deadlines. While I often would cross the finish line with less than fifteen minutes to spare, the book or blog was always where it needed to be on or before the last possible minute to be ready for publication.
Second, I knew it would be stressful. Not continually and sometimes worse than at other times, but what seemed like the inevitable pressure of creating to a deadline created sufficient stress in my life and world that my wife would have to steel herself each time I accepted a new contract, knowing that when push came to shove she could kick me out of the house so I could go through the worst of it in a hotel instead of lying next to her in bed.
The most extreme example of this came, ironically, when I was working as the developmental editor on a book about how to control stress. I took on the assignment with only six weeks to get the book from a puddle of possibilities to something tangible, coherent, and helpful; by the time we finished, I wanted to take not only my own life but the lives of most of the people around me.
But as I gained more and more experience as a writer, I came to see that neither the pressure nor the stress that I associated with the process was coming from the deadline or the task at hand. Sometimes I would feel stressed months in advance of a deadline; other times, I would be coming down the home stretch with no feeling of pressure whatsoever.
This insight came to a head a couple of years ago when I began working on the manuscript for a new book called Creating the Impossible. I had run public and corporate versions of the program for close to a decade, so I felt confident that this would be a relatively easy thing to write. I didn’t freak myself out at all as the delivery date approached, and even my wife commented on how calm I seemed. And then, for the first time ever, I missed a publication deadline. My publisher very kindly moved the release of the book back by a couple of months to give me more than enough time to finish.
And then I missed the second delivery date as well. I felt oddly liberated, finally understanding the words of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, who said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”
It was around that time that my agent phoned me to check in on how it was all going.
“Great,” I replied. “I’ve never felt so chilled and at peace around missing a deadline.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said with quiet humor in his voice. “How’s the book coming?”
And that was the moment where I fell down the staircase of insight and bumped my head onto a couple of simple truths about the relationship between productivity, performance, results, stress, pressure, and deadlines.
Our common cultural memes around performance are that what we do or don’t do is a huge determinant of how we feel, and how we feel in turn determines what we do. We feel pressure, stress, guilt, and shame when we’re not doing what we think we should, and we attempt to use those feelings to compel ourselves into action.
But what I saw as clear as day was that what we do and how we feel are two completely independent variables. I’d had plenty of experiences of feeling stressed out and taking action; I now had an experience of not feeling stressed out and not taking action. But that didn’t mean that the two things had a cause-effect relationship.
Here was the first truth:
When it comes to productivity, performance, and results, pressure and stress are independent variables and the result of my own thinking, not the result of any external deadline.
The more I caught myself pressuring myself and stressing myself out with scary thoughts about imaginary futures where I failed to meet my deadlines, the less real those scenarios began to seem.
I recognized that there had been any number of times where I felt great and got a ton done and an equal number of times where I’d felt stressed and pressured and gotten a ton done. And while in this instance, my inactivity coincided with a feeling of ease and comfort, I had no shortage of examples of inactivity accompanied by feelings of discomfort.
At some level, I already knew this. For over twenty years, my go-to move as a coach when a client complained about putting off a task as a symptom of procrastination was to ignore their complaint and tell them to call me back when the task was done. Inevitably, things that had previously seemed impossible for them to get themselves to do, like paying bills, having a difficult conversation, or getting started on a big project, found themselves getting done without anything having to change in my client’s psychology.
But because I hadn’t seen the principles behind it, I thought of it as a cool trick — a way of getting people into action when it worked and annoying the heck out of them when it didn’t.
I could now see a second incredibly practical truth:
What gets done has pretty much everything to do with what we do and almost nothing to do with how we feel.
So while conversations about getting better at managing the stress and pressure we see as being inherent in deadlines might be interesting, in and of itself, they won’t really help us get the job done. Whether our job is writing a book, hitting a golf ball, building a house, or building a business, our results will be largely a function of the writing, hitting, and building that we do regardless of how we happen to be feeling while we do it.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the feeling of ease and flow that often accompany my work and would choose it ten times out of ten over the feelings of stress and pressure that sometimes show up in my scary and insecure thinking instead.
But I also love that when it comes to getting things done in the world, I can do what there is to do regardless of how positive or “enlightened” I happen to be feeling from day to day.
So if you’re struggling trying to meet a deadline or stressing out about the fact that they just keep “whooshing” past, here’s a simple rule of thumb you can follow:
Every hour you put your energy and attention into the project itself will move the project forward; every hour you put your energy and attention into your thoughts and feelings about how the project is going will cost you time, energy, and attention (and generally contribute to feelings of stress, pressure, and discouragement).
Michael Neill, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Michael Neill is an internationally renowned leadership coach, author, speaker, and thought leader. He has worked with executives and teams from Disney, Google, Netflix, Pixar, Public Health England, and more, challenging the prevailing mythology that stress and struggle are prerequisites to creativity and success. His TEDx Talks, bestselling books, podcasts, keynotes, training, and retreats are designed to unleash the human potential with intelligence, humor, and heart and have inspired and impacted millions of people at the United Nations and on six continents around the world.
