[closeparen]

I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived.

This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.

[gkop]

I worked very closely with somebody when we were both about 10 years out of college. Unlike you and I, she still believed that “cramming” by staying up late to meet a deadline was a worthwhile strategy. I shared my reasoning with her, and nudged her over time, calling attention to the concrete detrimental impact of pursuing short term goals at the expense of intermediate term capacity and personal well-being, but she wouldn’t budge. This is a very smart person who ostensibly shared similar educational and professional experience to myself, that simply reached a very different conclusion. She ended up modifying her behavior only after going through a painful and damaging burnout.

How does a person go through university and not learn this lesson? Should we teach them the better way? How?

Edit: I remembered a potential clue- my coworker was able to transition from work to sleep rather easily, where I require a substantial wind-down period. Perhaps this shifted the equation.

[mcbuilder]

In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch.

Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work.

And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.

[yowlingcat]

> In the real world

Do we just live in the different real worlds? Because in my real world, deadlines are almost always arbitrary and fungible so long as the right kind of communication is made -- the only times I've seen that not be the case for me/folks in my network is 1) when they're working on something that's actually time critical (rare but does happen) and 2) when they're working in a dysfunctional, top-down environment (far more common).

I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea that you might lose a client by missing a deadline by 2-3 weeks (rather than not selling them well enough). Is this a hypothetical situation you're talking about? Sometimes, 2-3 weeks is as fast as they'll get back to you with a single hop of communication. The other example of engineers get down-evaluated for ending up jumping on the grenade of a task that gets significantly longer (sometimes by months) -- I do see that happen from time to time but whether the manager down-evaluates is often inversely correlated with that manager/management chain's capability. The good managers understand that scope creep and an unforeseen gotchas happen; they don't want to take those instances as failures but rather .

> When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.

Why? That sounds like unproductive, unhealthy self-martyrship. It's the complete opposite of how a competent professional works through things. Do you simply like to suffer? There's a reason people don't work like that in the "real world" and it's because there are actual real dollars on the line and competent organizations understand that such behavior purely results in expensive unforced errors.

[gkop]

Would you see my sibling comment? What about your experience do you think caused to conclude that losing sleep is justified to meet a deadline, when others have reached the opposite conclusion?