Prioritisation: should intermediate deadlines be staggered?
An important assignment can remain low on the agenda for a long time, then absorb everyone's attention as delivery approaches. The managerial question is specific: does staggering intermediate deadlines improve execution, or merely add constraints?
What the literature establishes
Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch (2002, Psychological Science) studied deadlines as a means of limiting procrastination in academic assignments and a proofreading task. Participants were willing to impose binding deadlines on themselves, but did not distribute them optimally. In the proofreading experiment, evenly spaced external deadlines produced better results than participant-selected deadlines or a single final deadline.
Why the final deadline sometimes motivates too late
Piers Steel (2007, Psychological Bulletin), in a meta-analytic and theoretical review, identifies the delay before a task's consequences among the factors associated with procrastination. His theoretical framework describes motivation as sensitive to the temporal proximity of expected outcomes. An intermediate deadline may therefore bring a consequence of the work closer, provided it corresponds to an identifiable output rather than a simple reminder.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every project should be divided into a tightly packed series of mandatory deadlines. Yet these studies establish neither a universal frequency nor the superiority of imposed constraints in every workplace situation. Where work involves substantial uncertainty, fixing intermediate deliverables too early risks redirecting effort towards compliance with the schedule rather than the intended outcome. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
The deadline experiments concern bounded tasks that differ from some collaborative projects involving successive approvals. The meta-analysis brings together associations; it is not a trial of staggered deadlines in Zurich companies. A genuinely usable deliverable must therefore be distinguished from an administrative milestone: meeting the latter does not demonstrate progress on the former.
A practical check in Zurich
As part of SHR's “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, a Zurich team in financial services, insurance, tech or a European headquarters could test intermediate deadlines on a category of recurring assignments. The proposed protocol is to define usable intermediate deliverables and their acceptance criteria before the next cycle, then compare the proportion of assignments accepted by the final deadline without major revisions against the previous cycle. Recording the time spent on intermediate approvals and any scope changes would also help assess the cost of the approach and qualify the comparison, without automatically attributing a causal effect to it. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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