How often have you worked to the last minute to get something done? This book reclaims the idea of the deadline and uses it in a way that helps you be successful at getting something done. The author studied nine different organisations as they approached a deadline and the book draws conclusions from these experiences.
It’s written in an entertaining, narrative style, but you’ll have to look for the takeaways for your own personal practice. The stories are interesting and provide a lot of food for thought as well as insights into organisations that both choose to impose deadlines (for example, the date for opening a restaurant) and have to work to deadlines (for example, the market for certain flowers, or a presidential campaign).
The Deadline Effect is an interesting read for managers and those in a leadership position, especially for people running projects. Next, I’d like to see a practitioner version that helps us learn from those organisations and what works and turns their experiences into practical steps for us to use.

Productivity books are always popular, as The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits can demonstrate. But The Deadline Effect: How to Work Like It’s the Last Minute — Before the Last Minute is more than just a book about being more effective: it’s an interesting amalgamation of productivity tips and deep dives into the lives of people meeting extraordinary deadlines.

From famous restauranteur Jean-Georges Vongerichten opening two new restaurants on back-to-back days, to a failed 2020 presidential campaign, to a military unit braced to provide immediate relief after hurricanes, Cox does an excellent job finding real life examples of the importance of deadlines.

This book was received as an ARC from Simon & Schuster - Avid Reader Press in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

This book really opened my eyes at not only the significance of deadlines but the stress that they bring and I appreciate the stories and background Christopher Cox shared throughout the book about how important it is to prioritize and not overwhelm yourself because of the fact that deadlines alone are so stressful and overwhelming. Learning about Christopher's background as well throughout the book was really enjoyable and as a Librarian, I appreciate when authors share personal experiences and open themselves up to the reader in which they know them like he was their closest friend. I also recognized a lot of the people Cox mentions in the book especially Jean Georges Van Grecten whom I am very familiar with being a foodie and a fan of Top Chef. I think a lot of people will learn from the Deadline Effect and I know it will do very well at our library.

We will consider adding this title to our Business collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

The Deadline Effect is an insightful guide exploring individuals and businesses who have succeeded under pressure and deadlines. Learn processes to meeting deadlines with benchmarks and checkpoints. This book sets a new perspective on deadlines with clever storytelling.

Thank you NetGalley and Avid Reader Press, for the advanced copy.

THE DEADLINE EFFECT

The comic Calvin and Hobbes had many memorable strips during its run, but creator Bill Watterson certainly hit the nail on the head with the one published on May 21, 1992.

The strip finds the titular characters in a playground sandbox, with young Calvin playing instead of working on a story he should be writing for school.

“Do you have an idea for your story yet?” inquires Hobbes, his maybe-not-imaginary friend tiger.

“No, I’m waiting for inspiration,” Calvin replies. “You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.”

“What mood is that?” Hobbes asks as he sits beside Calvin.

“Last-minute panic,” Calvin retorts.

It’s perfect because…that’s how it is, isn’t it? Things just seem to come together whenever a deadline is set; even if it doesn’t, the fact that a deadline exists often unleashes a flurry of energy and activity cannot be denied.

Author Christopher Cox writes about exactly this in his book The Deadline Effect: How to Work Like It’s the Last Minute—Before the Last Minute.

“[W]ork tends to get delayed until right before time expires,” Cox writes. “That’s the deadline effect.” Framed in this manner, one would expect Cox to be concerned about how to decompress that work, so as to more evenly spread out the accompanying stress and effort. To be fair, Cox does explore this idea in the book. In truth, however, Cox approaches the matter from the opposite perspective: if deadlines ultimately prompt us to do our best work, how do we use them to our advantage? This is what Cox illustrates through stories as varied as a celebrated Michelin-starred chef opening a new restaurant, a ski resort’s operators preparing for the ski season, and even Cox’s own undercover experience signing up to work the floor at Best Buy on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

In a sense, there’s nothing entirely new to much of what Cox has to say about deadlines. Deadlines create a sense of urgency; a sense of urgency spurs us into action. (We know this.). Meanwhile, there are many strategies we can employ to meet our deadlines: we can set earlier and intermediate checkpoints, create a plan by working backwards from an expected milestone, tweak that plan based on inputs received along the way, et cetera. (We also know this.) It’s not rocket science, though that doesn’t make managing or harnessing deadlines any easier.

But what Cox does well is to contextualize these insights through the different stories he tells throughout the book. This is what makes The Deadline Effect interesting to read. Any productivity book can walk readers through how to manage deadlines, get stuff done, and avoid procrastination. Cox, on the other hand, hasn’t written any old productivity book. Instead, through some inspired storytelling, he gets readers to see deadlines in an entirely different light.

I love finding a non-fiction book that I can lose myself in. One that is effortless to read but still jammed full with new things to learn. This is one of those non-fiction books that I really didn’t know for sure I would be interested in but end up loving it. I loved the structure of this book. Instead of using the format of long descriptions of the theory behind his points or passages explaining it with short examples, he uses long detailed descriptions of SEVEN completely different businesses or situations and along the way makes points about deadlines. Each of these seven chapters gives an in-depth look at something fairly common but that I had never thought about how they do it – farms that get Easter lilies to market at the right time every year (and how incredibly intensive and long that process is), getting a ski resort ready for a Thanksgiving opening without the benefit of enough naturally occurring snow fall and how Best Buy gets ready and operates a store on Black Friday. The author references several other authors whose work I have enjoyed in the past (Dan Ariely and Charles Duhig and Dan Kahneman) and ties the concept of deadlines together from a behavioral science perspective. I appreciate the early copy from Net Galley and Avid Reader Press and look forward to writing reviews.

I was really looking forward to this book but quickly found it got too dense for comfort. It actually made my head hurt with the amount of detail included, which frankly seemed unnecessary.

Plus, you have to extract the learning as you go. It's just too much hard work for too little reward, sorry.

Perhaps some breakout boxes would help. I lost patience by the end of chapter 3.