Under Pressure.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is a reminder of how deadlines and pressure can shape our efficiency and creativity in unexpected ways.

When I came across this fortune, it made me curious. I got an early start this morning and had little extra time, so I looked it up. There’s actually a theory behind this concept called Parkinson's Law, named after a guy who wanted to figure out why work seems to expand to fill the time you give it. If your client gives you one week to complete the project, it’ll somehow stretch into every minute of that entire week. Conversely, if your client narrows down the time you have for the same project, doing the work becomes more efficient and somehow still meets the shorter deadline.

How does this happen? The obvious reason tasks fill every minute of the available time is our tendency to procrastinate. It’s like when you have all day to clean your desk and end up spending the first few hours taking a break, looking at Reels videos, and enjoying a leisurely coffee. Procrastination is an art form, skillfully turning every extra moment into an opportunity to defer the task at hand, rather than diving into the work directly.

Procrastination’s cousin perfectionism loves to show up when there’s time to fill, and together they form a formidable duo. While procrastination finds clever ways to sidestep tasks, perfectionism is busy, busy, busy, creating more work to delay them. It’s all about focusing on making every detail flawless, often to the point where the real task might not get started, never mind actually getting completed. It’s like adjusting the application icons on your desktop instead of actually opening them to start working. This quest for perfection keeps you locked in a cycle of delays, waiting for the “perfect” moment that never arrives.

On the other hand, when a deadline is shorter, our focus sharpens, and we have to cut out the fluff. We prioritize efficiently, make quicker decisions, and work with a sense of urgency, which helps us complete the task in the condensed timeframe. It’s a fascinating quirk of human productivity: more time often leads to less efficient work, while tight deadlines can drive us to be more effective and streamlined.

A major industry event was coming, and our client asked if we knew a good writer who was knowledgeable about their industry and could write an eBook for them to offer to prospects at the event. We reached out to a contact we had made in the market to see if he could recommend any writers. He said he was between jobs at the moment and could write it himself. During the kickoff call, he presented an outline that impressed our client, and we were off to the races!

A few weeks later, the deadline arrived, but his first draft hadn’t. We emailed, texted, and called him, and he eventually sent the beginning of the eBook, but the last two sections were still blank. He promised that we’d have the rest of it in a few days. With some persistent daily nagging, he sent our client the final sections, which was a great relief because I was already boarding a flight for a week’s vacation and was glad to have this off my plate.

About 30 minutes after my flight landed, I got a panicked call from our client explaining that at least 80% of the eBook was word-for-word copied from their competitor’s website and an entire section was plagiarized from an article on Forbes. My heart sank. I did the only thing I could think to do, which was to offer to write the eBook myself. With their big event only days away, the client did the only thing they could do, which was to let me try. We agreed to talk again at noon the next day.

When our Uber reached our vacation destination, I got some coffee, set myself up at a little desk, and started writing. For the first several hours, most of what I wrote was absolute, unusable trash. I paced the floor, talked to myself, cried a little, went outside and yelled at the moon, and then just kept coming back to that little desk. By midnight, I had two decent paragraphs, and I felt like giving up might be the only logical option.

Then somehow it happened.

The words just started flowing. I caught onto an idea that demanded to be written and swept me into a jet stream. It was like riding a raft on a white-water rapid that carried me where it wanted to go. As the sun came up, it was basically writing itself, and by 11:30, I had written about 20 pages and emailed the whole thing to our client for review before our call.

At noon, I joined the call. After exchanging some pleasantries, I humbly asked what they thought of what I had written. No one said anything. I physically squinted my eyes and clenched my teeth awaiting their feedback. The pause lasted too long to be good news, signaling my greatest fear that I had failed.

Finally, the creative director broke the silence saying, “This is actually very good. You should have just written this to begin with.” The VP of Marketing chimed in, “I don’t know how you did this in one night, but this is exactly what we were looking for.” The only thing I could think to say was, “Thanks. I would have offered to write it for you, but I didn’t think I had enough time.” As the words left my lips, everyone laughed at the irony.

So what is the lesson here? Procrastination, especially when placed in the wrong hands, can lead to dire consequences. Yet sometimes, the constraints of time and the pressure of impossible deadlines can spark our best work. Either way, I guess it really is as today’s fortune says, “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.”