It’s All Your Perfect Little Fault

“Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change.”

– R.E.M., “I Believe”

It’s your fault that you have unrealistic project deadlines from others

There, I said it. People who don’t know how to create websites don’t know how long it takes to do it. Maybe they never will. They are picking arbitrary amounts of time for you to complete things because they don’t know how long it takes. Guess what? You DO know how long it takes, and you need to tell them that, again and again.

This is going to sound crazy, but you may need to stop meeting every deadline. Does this give you a little twitchy nerve over your right eyebrow? Mine is twitching right now just typing this. But let us face a harsh truth: If you work on the web in higher education, it is almost guaranteed that you have been given many projects in which the deadlines are grossly unrealistic. It is easy enough to just complain that this is unfair and unreasonable, but that isn’t actually going to change anything. Why does this happen? What can you do to change it?

And speaking of expectations, you need to change yours. It is easy and fun and cathartic to tell stories about how “they” just don’t get it, and “they” think the web is magic, and “they” need to figure it out. Guess what? They don’t. They need to figure out the web and how it works as much as you need to figure out your home’s electric wiring grid and how it works. They need the web to work, and that is as far as they will ever go. But they also need to know how long it takes for the web to work well, and in order to shape this expectation, they need you to hammer it home, every single day. If you don’t hold the line as far as what is reasonable, it will never become reasonable.

It’s your fault that you don’t have the time to do what you want to do

Everything has a cost. Doing nothing has a cost just as much as doing everything at once, because time is a finite resource. The things you could have done in the time you spent doing something else is known as an opportunity cost. If I put $10,000 under my pillow for a year, it costs me the interest I could have gotten out of putting it in a bank. If I visit friends in another city over the weekend, it costs me the opportunity to complete some household projects. If I spend the amount of time needed to complete a project perfectly, it costs me the completion time to do 3 other projects very well. Do you have time to complete every project perfectly? Nobody does. Can you afford the cost of being perfect?

It’s your fault that “they” don’t understand

Here is my challenge to all of you. I personally have failed this challenge so many times it isn’t even funny, but I keep on trying nonetheless. The next time somebody tells you that you need to get a project done in an unrealistic period of time, tell them you can’t and this is how long it will take to do it well. Here comes the hard part: when the unrealistic deadline arrives, don’t finish it. That’s right, don’t complete it on time. Just let it go. “But I’ll get in trouble! I’ll be seen as lazy! Irresponsible!”

Maybe, maybe not, but it is likely that the person who made the unrealistic deadline in the first place will have to consider why, in all the time you have done projects for them, this one was late. And that is when you have your conversation with them, that it isn’t done because it isn’t possible for it to be done. Do this enough and you could actually start to move the expectations gauge down a bit from the ‘insanity’ level it is always at.

It’s your fault you work too much

Here is the real rub. All that extra time, all that extra effort, that you are putting in to make something perfect? The people who want you to have this done probably won’t notice the difference. And guess what? They probably never will, because they are not looking for it. Their only gauge to how much can be done in a reasonable amount of time is how much you do for them in the time that has been given to you. So pull an 80 hour week to meet unrealistic expectations, and boom! 80 hour weeks are the new expectation. Nobody knows how much work goes into the web, you say. People think the web is magic. Well, it isn’t. Stop making it seem like it is.

It’s your fault you are stressed

We need to stop. Stop working overtime on unrealistic deadlines. Stop skipping lunch just to ‘tighten things up’ on a last minute request. Stop feeling constantly let down when what could have been done perfectly in a reasonable amount of time falls short in a rush job, in spite of us killing ourselves to make it so. Stop the blood, sweat, and tears. Stop the martyrdom. This is your job, and you are a professional. You know what great work looks like and you know how long it takes and you need to tell everyone and hold the fault line.

We need to rethink the way we react to these situations. Let me be clear: I am not condoning laziness or shoddy work. I am condoning sanity and balance, and the only way to arrive at a sane, balanced point is to begin with our own behaviors. Stop trying to be perfect. Change the fault lines.