785: How to Improve Focus and Productivity through Smarter Deadlines with Christopher Cox

Pete Mockaitis
Christopher, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Christopher Cox
Hi, Pete. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some wisdom from your book The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock, but, first, I want you to regale us with some tales from Everest base camp and/or summiting Kilimanjaro.

Christopher Cox
Oh, wow, yeah, that takes me back. That was one long trip that I took between college and grad school. I went all the way around the world, and all sorts of things happened on those trips. So, climbing Kilimanjaro is maybe the most dramatic story because it’s a multi-day journey, and on the last day, you have to climb up, at least on the route that I took, a very steep, I don’t want to call it a cliff, but it’s almost a cliff, and it’s covered in ice and snow, and it snowed that night that I was supposed to climb.

And you start off at about 2:00 in the morning. And part of the reason you start it at 2:00 in the morning is you want the ice to be frozen. During the day, it starts to melt and it gets slippery. And so, we’re climbing up the ice and I was with one other person, my guide, and after about 30 minutes or 45 minutes up this steep, steep expanse, his flashlight goes out and he asked me, “Do you have your flashlight?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” And then we had about 40 seconds of that flashlight before it went out, too.

And so, we did the final three hours of the climb in the cold and the snow and the steep in complete darkness, which was frightening at first, but then basically he said, “I want you to put your feet exactly where my feet are and we’ll just climb up that way.” And we made it and we reached the top exactly as the sun rose over the savannah, and it was a feeling of pure euphoria.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Cool. Well, so digging into the book a bit, can you share any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made when putting together The Deadline Effect?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, the book, I sort of did two modes of research to write the book. One was reading as many studies as I could on procrastination and deadlines and productivity that I could. And the other was I went out and did a bunch of reporting, so I ended up embedding in nine different organizations and learning how they worked.

And so, each of those two paths of research led me to different insights. I would say that just from reading academic literature, the first thing that jumped out at me, which I saw replicated in study after study, was how powerful shortening a deadline can be. One of the very first papers I read was about the US Census and they were trying to figure out how to get more people to reply to the mail-in census. So, not when a person comes through a door but just the thing you get in the mail.

And it turned out that if you can increase the response rate for the mail-in census by one percentage point, it would save the US government $75 million per percentage point. So, there’s a big motivation to get more people to mail these things in. And so, they did some research and studies and experiments to see how they could increase that response rate.

And one of the things they discovered, which seemed counterintuitive to me at first, was if you actually give people less time to reply, they’re more likely to do so. And so, they did an experiment where they had two groups. They both had the same deadline to return the mail-in response to the census, but one group had a week less to do it.

And the group that had a week less to do it was more likely to turn it in. And there are all sorts of other positive benefits they saw, the data was higher quality, if the people had less time to turn it in, too. And so, I read that and that really got me intrigued, and that’s when I started to sort of delve in deeper into this subject.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is good. And so, you know, it’s funny, with these sorts of things, you can, after the fact, 20/20 hindsight, say, “Oh, yeah. Well, of course, if they don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I could do that. I need some time over the next few weeks,” is very different than, “Oh, shoot, I better get on this now,” while they have the piece of paper in hand. So, I guess I see the psychological effect at work, at least that’s my speculation. Is that the driving force there?
Christopher Cox
Yeah, I think that’s right. There is a tendency to sort of put things off into the last minute if you possibly can. And I often say, like, the very worst deadline that you can give to yourself is to say, “As soon as possible.” It’s better to have it be concrete, and even if it’s further off than you might want it to be. So, as soon as possible, and you feel like, “Okay, that means I need to get it done tomorrow.” But if you actually set a concrete date of, “No, it’s going to get done in a week,” that tends to be more effective in getting you to actually complete whatever project it is you’re trying to get done.

And so, one of the other things that came up in sort of looking at how adjusting the timing of the deadline can increase your ability to complete a project was I read all these papers on procrastination. And procrastination affects us all to greater or lesser extents. One economist I read called it sort of the universal human problem.

But I read this interesting paper called “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences.” So, you think you procrastinate things you don’t want to do, but it turns out we all tend to procrastinate things that we do want to do. And there are two social scientists named Susanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, and they devised this pretty ingenious experiment.

They gave out coupons for a free slice of cake. So, again, this is not something that you would think people would want to avoid. And one of the coupons expired in three weeks, and a different version of the coupon expired in two months. And it turned out that the people who had three weeks, so more than a month less time to get their free cake, were five times more likely to use their coupon.

Pete Mockaitis
Five times.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, like a dramatic effect of shortening the deadline there. And I think it’s just what you say, with that urgency provided by the deadline, and not giving people time to be distracted from what they’re supposed to be doing, you’re going to increase your likelihood of getting things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these are tantalizing insights right there. If we were to zoom out a bit, what would you say is the core message, thesis, big idea behind The Deadline Effect?

Christopher Cox
Well, in terms of what I saw in the organizations that I studied, there were two big conclusions that sort of tie everything together. The first was successful organizations take deadlines seriously, and that sounds very simple but that is step number one. You have to take them seriously. You have to set a deadline. You have to make it concrete.

And the second thing that united them was they set up their deadlines in the organization so that no individual employee ever faced a deadline alone, so they increased what social scientists called interdependence. And so, that meant that procrastination, more or less, gets taken out of the equation because there are so many different enforcement mechanisms on any individual person trying to get something done that they’re goaded into action. They’re kept to schedule because so many other people are relying on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. So, while an individual might have a deadline for himself or herself, there is a broader deadline that a team or a collection of contributors is all working towards, thus ensuring that the individual is able to get it done so that the team gets it over the line by the date. Is that accurate?

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that is accurate. And so, the first place that I saw this came from my own working life before I wrote this book, and even now I have a career as a magazine editor. And I began the book with a question sort of in the back of my mind, which is, I worked at a lot of different magazines over the past 20 years, and they are populated by people who can be weirdos and artists and writers and all sorts of people who you don’t expect to be the most disciplined human beings on earth.

And yet, somehow, month after month for a monthly magazine, or week after week for a weekly magazine, they publish something, they get a magazine out there consistently. For a while, I was the chief editor of Harper’s Magazine, which has been publishing since 1850. And so, what is that – 172 years? They haven’t missed an issue in 172 years. How could that be after all sorts of different people coming through there?

And so, I started to look at what made that possible, and I think they did those two things. They took deadlines seriously from the beginning. Deadline is a word that exists from the publishing industry. And they set up the process of publishing so that it was highly interdependent.

So, in my work as an editor, I would get writers to file an article to me, and that very relationship, the two of us working together, me reminding the writer to stick to the deadline, that was the first bit of interdependence that helped get things done on time but it wasn’t just that. I, in turn, was hearing from the art department, saying, “Where is that article? We need to start to think of the photographs for it or commissioning artwork for it.” And the fact checkers are saying the same thing to me, and to the art department, and the copy editors were saying the same thing.

And so, eventually, you have an organization that’s highly interdependent where everyone is working together to get this project done, even though it ultimately is going to appear as an article with one person’s name on it. And so, that is a machine built to get people to meet their deadlines. And that same writer, if left to their own devices, they’re writing an essay for themselves at their desk, they’re not going to show it to anyone, could end up procrastinating indefinitely, and often do.

I definitely know writers that I work with who say, “I cannot work unless I have the demands set up upon me by magazine deadlines, editors, and everyone else waiting for me to turn my copy in.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious, having worked with so many writers, how often do they hit the deadline that you originally established with them?

Christopher Cox
Well, I would say that the writers who will meet a deadline without me saying anything are definitely the exception rather than the rule. But that’s where I come in.

First, my mere presence there, saying, “Please give this to me,” reminding them helps a bit. And then I can also start using some of the strategies that might suggest themselves from the academic literature, which is if I have a writer and I know that I have to have a piece ready to print on Friday, I’m not going to tell them to send it to me on Thursday. I’m going to tell them to send it to me a week ahead of time.

And so, you start pushing their deadline up, which pushes them into action earlier, and that gives everyone else more time to refine the piece, make it better, and it sort of becomes a positive reinforcement loop as you sort of work to make the article as good as possible before publication.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so if we’re zooming in to professionals who want to do better about managing their time and meeting goals and objectives, are there some deadline magic, tactics, principles, guides that we can take on to achieve more better?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, I think that, set a deadline, make it concrete, that’s step one. If you can set your own deadline, then give yourself maybe just a little bit less time to finish it than you feel comfortable with. That shorter deadline might serve as an inspiration. And then the bigger the project, the more you might start thinking about strategies, like self-imposing interim deadlines.

And this is something that I saw when I went out reporting. I spent some time with Jean-George Vongerichten, who’s a famous restaurateur. He has, oh, gosh, 45, maybe it’s more, restaurants around the world. And I went with Jean-George as he opened two restaurants back-to-back over two days in May of 2019, and watching him do that, I got to see his organization was a machine that was perfectly tailored to opening restaurants. They’ve done it often and they knew how to do it.

Meeting their deadline but having the final product, having the restaurant be as buttoned-up as possible. One of the reasons they want it to be as buttoned-up as possible on day one is they knew the reviewers are going to come that first week often, and they can’t afford to have something sloppy being put in front of a reviewer who might make or break the restaurant.

And so, Jean-George and his team were masters of using interim deadlines. And the way that they get that was something called mock services, which is basically what it sounds like. As soon as they could, and as often as they could, they served meals in these new restaurants, the restaurant before it had open, pretending that it was a regular service night at the restaurant.

So, I went to one of the two restaurants, it was called Fulton that’s in Lower Manhattan, and I first went to it about 30 days before it opened. And that first day that I was there, they’re not serving to real customers but they sat down some of the wait staff, they even brought in members of the construction company’s staff, and I think some interior decorators, and they sat them down and they served them some of the dishes they’re planning for that restaurant, and they worked on fine tuning the service part of it, they worked on fine tuning the taste, they asked them for their opinion on everything.

And they did that day after day after day, every single day until it opened. And that was, one, it had ensured that on actual opening day, that they were ready, and it also allowed them to improve consistently over that same period of all these mock services up until opening day, and, of course, beyond. But on opening day, you wouldn’t have known that it was the first day it was operating. Everything was pretty darn seamless. I was very impressed by what I saw there.

Pete Mockaitis
And that notion of opening day of not necessarily being what we assume when we think about an opening day, you also saw in theatrical releases. Can you talk about that?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, I spent some time in the public theater, and I watched them develop a show for its world premiere. And what I saw there were a few different things happening at once. They had that same sort of daily check-in, daily revisions that Jean-George had in his restaurant.

But one of the things that really struck me about watching this come together was I had a fairly naïve notion of what a theatrical production looked like when you put it on. I sort of thought, “Okay, you write the play and you rehearse it, and then there’s dress rehearsal, and then it’s done.” But what I actually saw with this performance was dress rehearsal was sort of the midpoint in a longer process of improving the performance, improving the play that they’re putting on.

So, I went to dress rehearsal, and then after that, I went to the first of several preview performances where they had audiences there, and they actually changed the performance considerably based on the feedback from the audience, which makes all the sense in the world. Audiences sort of who you’re to perform for but I found it inspiring, really. And then when I talked to the director, he said, “Oh, yeah, like this is the way it’s always worked in theater.”

The social science name for it is sense-making and updating. So, you take a pause after each day and you figure out what’s going right and what’s going wrong, and then you update according to what you assess along those lines. And the theater producers have figured out how to formalize that process in a way that we don’t often do in our regular life.

And seeing that in the theater made me realize that that is the sort of maneuver that we all need to do in our everyday life, and not just for work projects; for everything. Like, take a pause every day or more often than that, depending on what you’re doing, and take time to assess what you’re doing, the effectiveness, and think about how you might update it.

And so, the interesting academic study I read about sense-making and updating, it was called “More and Less Effective Updating” and it studied 19 different ER teams during a training exercise. And the training exercise was they had a young boy come in as a patient – again, it’s just an exercise, it wasn’t real – who’s complaining of troubled breathing.

And the experiment had been set up so that a crucial piece of equipment, a sort of a mask they use to help the child to breathe, had failed, and they were testing to see who’s going to stop and just try to make sense of the situation, like, “Why are we not helping this child? This device, which is supposed to help the child breathe, why is it not working?” And if you do it well, you will see that this mask is broken, and you’ll update your behavior accordingly.

And the teams that were most effective were the ones who had that instinct, I guess, to stop what they’re doing, even though there’s a child on the table and everything is pushing you to sort of just heedlessly push forward. It doesn’t seem like there’s time to stop and assess the situation. But those teams that did were the ones that saved the child’s life in this exercise because they were able to say, “Okay, let’s figure out what’s wrong here.” And once they figured out the broken mask, it was easy to keep the child healthy and stable.

That was sort of a high-stakes version of the same process but from medicine, to theater, to restaurant opening, it’s a process that we would all do well to remember to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy, certainly. So, we have a deadline, and so some piece of completion must…I guess there’s all kinds of layers of final, and in some ways it’s never final. You’re constantly potentially iterating and tweaking on end but there are key milestones in terms of, “Someone is going to eat our food,” or, “The doors are going to open to people from the public,” and those are different dates and different milestones and different expectations.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, no, exactly. I think that, we talked earlier about interdependence, there’s a different sort of…it’s not really interdependence but it’s the same sort of mechanism where if you know that there’s going to be a real-paying audience out there watching you perform, or real-paying group of people coming in to eat dinner at your restaurant, that adds stakes to what you’re doing and it concentrates the mind, as they say.

And so, Jean-George, knowing that that first day that that restaurant opened, there are going to be real people there expecting high-quality service and cuisine, that motivated him to get that restaurant as good as possible for opening day. And yet he still continues to improve the restaurant after it had opened. Some deadlines, that’s the way they work. You want it to be as good as possible on opening day or whenever it’s due but you have a chance to improve beyond it.

And part of the wisdom of these organizations, and what I’m sort of trying to help readers discover in the book, is how to take that kind of move, that having what is basically a finished product ready before the actual real final deadline, and that gives you time to improve, revise, make it better. Again, in the magazine world, that’s what I dealt with all the time. Just getting that first draft out of the writer was maybe the most crucial step. And then we have, hopefully, enough time to go through revision after revision and make it better. Obviously, that’s going to be better than the thing that’s completed at the very last minute.

Like the term paper you did in college, that you did an all-nighter for, that was not your best term paper, was it? It was the one that you labored over and gave yourself extra time on because you knew it was super important. And so, recreating that dynamic is sort of what I saw the most effective of these organizations doing. And in the book, I sort of try to point the reader toward ways to build that time into your schedule so you can do the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s talk about some of those approaches. I’m thinking about when there are self-imposed deadlines, often they…well, they just don’t have the pull that hundreds of people are showing up at a restaurant has. So, any way we can get some more of that motivational oomph when it’s just something that we made up for ourselves?

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that’s a great question, and I would say that, first, you set up these interim deadlines. Let’s say you’re trying to finish, let’s say, it’s a term paper, why not? A lot of us have had that experience. If you set up a deadline for yourself, say, “A month before it’s due, I want to have the first draft done,” or if it’s a longer work, “I want to have the first chapter done,” then do that. Impose that deadline on yourself.

And there’s good news about those kinds of deadlines. Even fake deadlines, even self-imposed deadlines are effective. They’re not as effective as a deadline where there’s a real penalty imposed upon you or a real audience out there, but they still have an effect. Actually, there’s an experiment that I write about in the book. Daniel Ariely conducted this with his students, he wrote the book Predictably Irrational.

Ariely set up an experiment with his class where he basically had three different experimental groups within it. One group got to choose the deadlines for three papers they would write during the semester; one group all had the same deadline, which is the last day of class; and one group, Ariely imposed evenly spaced deadlines for the three papers throughout the semester.

You probably can guess the outcome. The people who had their papers all due on the last day of class performed the worst. The people who had mandatory deadlines evenly spaced by the professor did the best. But there’s something interesting about the third where they got to choose their own deadlines. Some of that group chose the last day of class. They maybe thought that the more time, the better, they would perform better, they had the most flexibility but they actually did just as badly as the people who had it all on the last day of class by design.

But within the people who got to choose, those who self-imposed evenly spaced deadlines on themselves did just as well as the ones who had mandatory evenly spaced deadlines. So, those were fake deadlines, there was no penalty if they didn’t turn it in on the date that they said, but those deadlines had an effect. They were almost like real deadlines for that class.

So, that’s the good news for those of you out there who are thinking, “Well, I can self-impose deadlines but it won’t make any difference because they won’t be real.” Like, if you believe in them and you set them and you make them concrete, they will have an effect.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And to that point, it’s interesting that you can sort of deduce some stakes and some relevance to your deadlines as opposed to them being purely arbitrary. Like, I think these students, again I’m speculating, could say, “Okay, if I don’t complete these in an evenly spaced fashion, I’m going to have a brutally miserable few days of my life,” so there’s that. And so, I guess that’s one means of making them real for yourself is by having an understanding, an articulation of just what would happen if I didn’t hit my self-imposed deadline.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, no, exactly. It sort of goes back to the original lesson, which is set a concrete deadline, take deadline seriously is the most basic part of it. And if you’re thoughtful about it, if you’re just deliberate about these things, it’s going to have a big effect on your performance and how good you are at getting things done before the last minute.

So, these students were wise, those who chose evenly spaced deadlines on their own. They sort of planned through what they thought would be most effective and put it into place, and it worked out for them.

Pete Mockaitis
And you were about to say a second piece. Please, lay it on us.
Christopher Cox
So, first, self-imposed deadlines with nothing else going for them will have an effect. But if you can bring in some enforcement mechanisms, if you can bring in that audience, bring in some way to sort of give those self-imposed deadlines teeth, as I call in the book, then you should. And, well, I did it myself.

So, I wrote this book, and it had a deadline, the publisher wanted it on March 1st, and I knew that I needed to make that deadline. It would be completely embarrassing to write a book about deadlines and miss my own deadline. And so, I was very deliberate about it. I had a little bit over a year to write it and to report it, and so I set up a very fleshed out schedule sort of for that year. And I planned what I was going to write each chapter, what I was going to research each chapter, and I hit most of those interim deadlines pretty well, not perfectly, but those interim deadlines were there and they helped me, and I got things done. Some things came in early. Some things came in late but it all worked out in the wash.

But one of the things that I did to help make those interim deadlines more effective was to start promising a chapter to my editor, or promising a chapter to my agent or to my wife. It didn’t matter, it didn’t have to be someone who had actual authority over me or anything. It could be a best friend, and say, “I’m going to finish this chapter about Jean-George and I’m going to send it to you.”

And just that promise, bringing someone else into the process, increasing the interdependence of what is often a very solitary pursuit, writing a book, helped me, helped me get things done on time. And it meant that, by the time March 1st rolled around, and my editor was ready for my book, I was ready to send it to him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, anyone will do.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, anyone will do and I think that…well, how to put this best?

Pete Mockaitis
Not to diminish your wife in any way. She’s very special.

Christopher Cox
No, exactly. In fact, I would say promising to my wife, that was the most demanding one. I wanted it to impress her. But, yeah, I would say try to create multiple enforcement mechanisms for yourself. So, if you’re a writer, don’t make it only your wife who sees it too, but also find someone else, who’s an outside party, so you have…it’s sort of like, in a magazine world, like, me thinking, “Oh, I have to meet the demands of the art department and the fact-checking department and the copy editor.” It’s the sort of multiple connections of interdependence that is the most effective at keeping you on target.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ll tell you, with the podcasts, having tens and thousands of folks who just sort of expect there’s going to be an episode on Monday and Thursday does wonders for me.

Christopher Cox
Oh, for sure. Having that audience out there, whether you’re doing a podcast or putting a magazine out or putting on a theatrical production, it really concentrates you and keeps you on target.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Christopher, I want to get your take, is there a dark side to deadlines? Is it all benefit or are there some watchouts we should be concerned about?

Christopher Cox
Well, I’ve certainly come to embrace and respect and rely upon deadlines, and I do think that the notion that I find myself pushing back against over and over again, especially when people know that I’ve written this book about deadlines, is that deadlines and creativity are somehow at odds, that we associate it with the task master putting us to work and there’s no room for creativity, and it has to be done by a certain date.

Then what happens if I have a brilliant insight that would only arrive if I gave myself endless time to work on it? But I just don’t think that’s the case. Like, I’ve seen it with the writers, brilliant writers, poets, novelists, all of them, they thrive under a deadline. And I saw the same thing in organizations as different from that as like the Air Force.

Like, I went and embedded in this Air Force unit and they were so deadline-driven and yet they were so focused, but they also seem the most at ease of anyone that I saw because they knew they were dialed in, they knew that they were going to meet their deadlines, and so they didn’t feel any stress. And I compared it to a state of flow, this state of complete concentration that has elements of euphoria to it.

So, I guess I would say that there is a dark side to deadlines but only if you’re not using them effectively. The original deadline effect is a concept in the economic world the tendency to delay things until the last minute. So, if you are negotiating and you have a deadline to finish up your negotiation, the deadline effect is that draw that makes you not settle until the last minute. That’s why settlements are reached on the courthouse steps, it’s that deadline.

But that’s kind of miserable. Procrastinating until the last minute and then rushing something out. And so, that’s the dark side but if you embrace deadlines, and know how to effectively deploy them, you can get rid of all that last minute nonsense and eliminate the painful period of procrastination and just get right into that mode of creative productive work as early as possible, and that is deeply satisfying.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Christopher, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Christopher Cox
Well, it’s out on paperback. The book is out on paperback now, and I would love for people to pick it up. But, no, I think you’ve covered quite a lot in a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. All right. Well, could you share now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Christopher Cox
There is a quote attributed to Einstein, which is “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And that, to me, spoke to me in my deadline work. And when I looked into that quote, he did say it but he said something much more long winded about it and it got boiled down into that more pithy version. And that sort of inspired me in a way because it’s sort of he had a brilliant idea, and even he needed an editor to improve it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Christopher Cox
Well, I read a lot of different studies for this book but probably the most fun…well, one would be that “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences” because it just was so strange to think that people would put off getting themselves a free slice of cake. But there is another one called “Procrastination by Pigeons” and it was part of a whole universe of animal studies that show that animals, too, procrastinate.

There was a rat study where rats tended to prefer a larger shock if they could put it off into the future than a smaller one right now. So, it’s a wild and wonderful world out there when you start to think about deadlines and procrastination, and the way that not just humans have a relationship with time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in a way, that’s a really good synopsis of what procrastination does, you’ll get a larger shock if later.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, and we impose that pain upon ourselves over and over again. We don’t learn. And just like rats, we don’t learn.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Christopher Cox
Well, one book that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is an old favorite, but that’s Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It’s a big weighty door stop but he is the master of research and going as deep as you can go on a subject. And I talk about him a little bit in my book as a negative example because he’s been working on his big LBJ project for, I guess, 50 years now, but I want to tell Robert Caro here now, I think what you’re doing is wonderful and I love your book, so forgive me for making fun of you a little bit in my own book.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Christopher Cox
Well, I think I probably will echo a lot of people who talk about sort of shutting off devices and finding time for yourself to be isolated. But here’s a much more mundane one. A while ago, I switched to waking up in the morning to make my coffee, and instead I pre-programmed my coffee every morning so it’s waiting for me when I wake up. And that has done wonders for my morning productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, that folks tend to really quote back to you frequently?

Christopher Cox
Well, there is a part in the book that we didn’t talk about, but I ended up doing one part of the book undercover, and I got a job at Best Buy, and the deadline in question there was Black Friday. So, I ended up working in Best Buy on Black Friday, and I watched how they completely reformed the way that store works just for that one day to handle the huge increase in crowds.

And I don’t know if Best Buy is often thought of as a model organization, but what I saw there absolutely impressed me. So, whenever I meet someone who’s read the book, they often asked me if I really did work at Best Buy, and I can prove it by talking at length about different fight-screen televisions.

Pete Mockaitis
So, did you confess? When you say undercover, do they know what you’re up to, or you’re just a pure normal employee? “Christopher, I see you have quite the resume in the writing world. What makes you interested in electronics?”

Christopher Cox
Yeah. I had to disguise some of my resume and play up other parts of it. I made a promise to myself that I would not lie to anyone, but I did not tell them, for example, that I was, at that moment, employed by a magazine. So, yeah, I tried to go in through the front door, I went to their PR department and said I want to write about Best Buy, I want to write about Black Friday. They spoke to me for a while and then ended up ghosting me.

And after about a year of trying that, I said, “All right. Well, I’m going to find a different way to tell the story.” And applied for a job, and got one, and worked for a few months just to prepare for that Black Friday. And then, finally, when it was all over, I told everyone I worked with what I was up to, and I changed their names for the books because they weren’t expecting to be written about. It’s a very positive chapter, so I hope that they’re happy with it even though I had to get in through slightly less than direct means.

Pete Mockaitis
I was just thinking about you’ve got your own deadline for the book about deadlines, and you’re like, “Oh, man, I got to shift.”

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that was a problem. It’s time-consuming to hold down a day job at Best Buy while also writing a book but, somehow, I managed to squeeze it all in.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Christopher Cox
The easiest thing to do would be to go to Deadline-Effect.com, and it’s got a bit of everything about the book and about me there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Christopher Cox
Well, I’ll repeat the first lesson, which is take deadlines seriously. I promise, you probably think you already do, but just be disciplined about it, be deliberate about it in everything you do, and, ultimately, it’s liberating. As your productivity goes up, you become happier, you spend less time feeling that painful procrastination, and you work life will get just that much better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Christopher, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck with all your deadlines.

Christopher Cox
Thank you, Pete. It’s been great to be with you.