Deadlines Are There To Be Honored

Dec 12, 2006

When you freelance honoring deadlines is a big aspect of your life otherwise things begin to slip away even before you realize it. I must confess the year 2006 was not good for me in terms of sticking to guidelines. In fact I lost a few projects (I returned the advances, of course) because I couldn’t follow through the deadlines. Do I procrastinate or mismanage time? No. I don’t like making excuses, but just for the sake of conversation, 2006 was a turbulent year in terms of health and family matters and sooner or later these things took their tole. Things though, have been pretty good since November. I’ve been completing all my assignments on time.

901am.com has a post titled: Fuck Deadlines Means Fuck Yourself. I partly agree with Thord (didn’t he use to be at The Blog Herald if I remember?) that once you give you word to your client, you should make sure you honor the deadline otherwise you seem like a very unprofessional person especially when you work on your own. Meeting deadlines inspires respect for you. When you complete a project within the deadline you show you not only respect your client’s time, you also respect your own time. If you keep crossing the deadlines, just think how many potential projects you are missing.

The post at 901am.com is a response to a post titled Fuck Deadlines at Wisdump where the author says deadlines no longer have meaning. The author concludes the post on a philosophical note:

I can’t say if doing bad work ever catches up to you in this new digital world, but if that day ever comes to pass a lot of us our fucked. Till then, fuck deadlines, it can wait till next week.

Sometimes it is not just possible to meet the deadlines. Especially when the client keeps on coming up with new requirements or new things to add. This sometimes happens while I’m writing content for a client. I send a draft, it is approved, and based on the approval I complete the copy and send it. Then suddenly new guidelines are sent and the document is to be re-written from scratch. In such cases the deadline goes out the window.

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