Think of the last time that you felt stressed. It can be work related or it could be a personal situation and it could also be a long term stressful situation or it could be a very short lived burst of stress.

I think hard what was causing you that stress because I bet you it was because you were rushing to hit a deadline for something.

Maybe it was a big launch, a client deadline, an application filing, some sort of paperwork or something. Or maybe it was just simply trying to make a flight.

But either way, all these situations include some sort of deadline feels like a doomsday countdown clock that makes you feel like Jack Bowen 24.

And after speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I’ve realized that almost all stress comes from a deadline of some sort. And there may not even be that obvious to you.

So this episode explores a few key things that I think could really help reduce stress levels if you’re an entrepreneur.

We’re going to cover why we cling to deadlines, how they mess us up, and how to set them in a way that actually helps instead of hurts.

Hello and welcome to Sniffing Out the Bullshit, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs who want help wading their way through the bullshit jungle of entrepreneurship and then the tools, skills, and mindset that are actually required for success.

I’m your host, Sabrina Chevannes, the no bullshit entrepreneur. So deadlines, somehow they managed to rule our lives. I don’t know how, but they seem to now be everywhere in some kind of way, and they’re putting this insane amount of pressure on us.

There’s now this culture in entrepreneurship where the world has decided that if you miss a deadline, you’re lazy, you’re unprofessional or you’re doomed to fail.

And the obsession with productivity and the amount of videos out there telling you that you’re going to be left behind until unless you do like X&Y time or something is just crazy Now it’s going nuts.

And yes, don’t get me wrong, I realize the irony in this.
I do teach people productivity, but not from a place of trying to hustle more, but actually the opposite.

I want people to develop systems that help you work less and actually achieve more.

So that’s what I try to do. But the problem is there’s so much of the opposite, which is creating this additional stress.

For example, let’s look at what so many of us do so frequently as entrepreneurs, and I’m definitely including myself.

This, for example, we tell ourselves we must launch by Friday or some date we must post daily on social media, and we must hit that goal by the end of the month.

Otherwise it’s deemed a failure. But why? Who said so? And it’s just getting silly because most of the time these deadlines are, well, completely made-up.
Like literally a date plucked from thin air.

And we we see the same compliance, right? Everything a client needs is somehow urgent and they must do something by a certain date.

But then as we’re doing it, as we’re busting our asses, they get super busy doing a million other things that they must be doing.

And the project then gets delayed but with 0 consequences for the delay other than them somehow getting annoyed with us from missing a deadline that they didn’t get back to us on.

So it’s all very crazy. And these dates are literally just random.

Most of the time.
What we’re doing is creating fake urgency. We are forcing pressure on ourselves and then wonder why we’re burnt out and we’re stressed and we’re delivering super work.

So we used to take a step back and we used to ask ourselves like, why are we creating these deadlines?

And whenever we are creating deadlines, we need to ask, is this really that urgent? Or was it just some bullshit pressure that we’ve invented?

And I want to address some of these daily pressures that we put on ourselves as I know that I am totally guilty of it.

So I just took some time off this summer because I got married. And so yeah, that took a lot of organizing time and there was a lot of stress.

And have a guess why there was stress?
Well, several factors which I’m not going to go into this blog card, but of course there was one huge deadline to hit my wedding day.

And do you know what? Another classic thing about deadlines. We always worry about so many things that don’t even matter.

Now, I was obviously stressed about so many things for the big day and then on the day, none of those things didn’t even matter.

The day went great despite other things going wrong and I just didn’t need half of that stress.

So naturally after this time, I took some time off. I had a great honeymoon and I had some fantastic quality time with my husband and I just wanted to take a break.

So obviously I paused work and I genuinely took a break, which was amazing by the way, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not taking a real break in a while, for me it was 10 years.

I recommend doing it highly, you know, So I’m obviously come back now and I’m back to work, but in my head, I decided that I was going to make my big comeback on the 1st of September.

I decided that my new website will be ready, I’d have a full content marketing plan ready and I’d be full on posting this content all over social media and I’d just be like ready to beast it.

And why did I pick that date? Well it was end of summer so it was a logical time I thought.

I just took my break. It was a start of an academic year so it’s a good time to reset.

It was the 1st of the month and it was a Monday. It literally could not be more perfect.

But it was the end of August and I felt the stress and the pressure building up.

So many things had gone wrong and there were insane delays with my website. And I was like, Oh my God, it’s not going to be up on time.

And everything else I’ve planned for that is not going to work because the website has to be up before the other content goes out.

And just then more things went wrong and then client stuff came up and that stressed me out more and I had to rush some other bits of the website saying I didn’t think things free because I was rushing.

I made little mistakes there.
And, you know, then this obviously stressed out the team and then other key members of the team were away.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There were loads of things. So what did I do? I stressed out. I was like, Oh my God, we’re going to miss this deadline.

The world’s over.
I mean, not quite that drastic, but I was stressed. I gave up my weekends to try and make this deadline. And I overworked.

And I’m tried to make sure that like, I delivered all my client stuff too, and I’m making sure that I wasn’t slacking there.

So therefore I was spending extra time there. They take it slow because I was extra stress on my website and I just spent all my time working. So that was a great way to start marriage, right?

Luckily, I have an incredibly supportive husband and he doesn’t listen to his podcast, so he listens to me enough in the day today.

So obviously I can say what I like. But yeah, it was not a good start. And today is what, the 15th of September when this is coming out and guess what?

My website is done, but what have I lost? My website being delayed two weeks. So two weeks of revenue maybe.

But do you know what? That’s just delayed revenue because I believe that if there was work coming in for that, it’s still going to come in, it’s just going to be a bit delayed.

And you know, OK, so I haven’t done anything in my content calendar yet. I haven’t posted any of the stuff I wanted to post on any other social media channels.

And so I’ve not done those because the website isn’t up.
And so it seems like a complete failure, right?

But then I’m like, why is it a failure?
Because I missed this deadline. But did I really miss a deadline? Or did I just pick a random date?

Because it seemed good, but actually had zero logic to it. And well, not zero logic.

I explained all the reasons, but it was just a very pretty date from the from how it looked and it just seemed so power fact.

But was there actually a financial or business reason that this had to be all done by the 1st of September?
Probably not.

I’m sitting here 2 weeks later and the website is still not up. Am I stressed?
Yeah, if I’m being honest, maybe a little bit.

But I know I’m, I’m OK. I’m OK.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not willing to sit around for ages until it eventually happens because everyone else is just going to also delay it and they’re going to do other things.

I thought I actually started this site back in November 2024. When I looked at my notes, when I wrote all the docs and the content, I was like, Oh my God, so much.

This is really outdated and it’s not been done because I’ve prioritized everything else in my life.

I obviously clients always come first and obviously have a lot of stuff going on, marriage and all that stuff, you know?

And so I prioritize everything else, you know. So deadlines are important, but it’s the arbitrary ones that cause more harm than good.

So that’s what I want to speak about because yes, my website should be up and hopefully fingers crossed it’s up this week because you know, it’s almost there and we’re going to start with hold done is better than perfect.

Then that’s another story for the other day. I’ll talk about these arbitrary deadlines, things like we must post every day on social media because consistency is the key.

How many times have you seen that on social? And I mean today because you’ve probably seen it multiple times today, right?

I am constantly hearing people moaning about this stuff. They’re saying if I don’t post today the algorithm’s going to punish me or if I miss just one day then this is going to completely mess up everything and all my hard work for the past few weeks have been gone. Like this is honestly what people believe, but all of it’s bullshit.

You’re believing what the social media gurus tell you because it benefits them if you believe it.

You follow them for their tips on the algorithm, and then you absorb their content about how consistency is key. And then suddenly you feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that you have to do to be able to compete.

And so then you feel like that the only solution is to get these experts to help you. Well, that’s happened.

Congratulations, you just got manipulated into taking out their services because at the end of the day, everything in business should come down to ROI.

Are you getting a positive ROI from the time on social media?

If so, then keep doing it. But if not, you either refine your strategy or you shift your attention to what actually does make you money.

And as I said, I see all the time with clients, right? We’ve had plenty of clients who tell us just how urgent a project is and they’re so adamant about it.

And because you know you want to offer a good service, you bust your arse for them. You drop everything, you do your own items, you get your team to work overtime hours and then they disappear for months.

That life or death urgent project, well, it often gets abandoned and they’ve moved on to the next urgent thing and then we have to battle to get paid.

PS Don’t start an agency anyway, the bottom line is people say everything is urgent and almost nothing is.

And this behaviour is so dangerous and we don’t even realize. Now you’ll probably have heard some huge disaster stories at like massive companies and now when you think back at it, you’re like, actually, that’s because of deadlines and you realize how bad deadlines are.

I’m just like a sort of coffee and I’m going to bring a couple to tell you about now I want to talk about the release of Samsung Galaxy’s Note 7.

Yes, a while ago, but it was the successor to the widely acknowledged Note 5, right? And I remember this new version was hyped up to be the most advanced smartphone to date.

Now I’m an Apple gown and even I was like, wow, this phone is going to be mega. But things did not go quite as expected. Within weeks of its release, there were reports of the device exploding and Catching Fire.

They had to halt their global sales and within 24 hours of doing this, Samsung then had to cut off their production lines. The model was record and there was a huge blow to Samsung’s reputation. Their market shares then plummeted and they lost a whopping $14.3 billion within weeks.

Billion. So why do you think they failed? Well, they were rushing to be Apple’s iPhone 7 launch. My understandably, right. They didn’t want Apple to gain excessive market share, as they often do, and so they rushed the release of their Galaxy Note 7.

But in turn, this meant the company had to cut corners in production, which then resulted in floor design, which inevitably led to the overheating and Catching Fire. And you know, I think the worst bet is, is that Samsung didn’t even really want to admit their failure.

And this is what causing their loss of reputation and the billions in loss of company value. So let’s have a think what actually happened here?
Samsung made a decision to rush the launch of their product because they wanted to be Apple to the punch. It’s an absolute classic situation when it comes to competitors.

They wanted first mover advantage, but then they put unnecessary pressure on themselves and they actually failed their brand. And in fact, they actually then created fast follower advantage instead. And so the money they thought they’d lose for not being launched when Apple like we’re doing their thing was actually tiny in comparison to what they lost for rushing and releasing an inadequate product.

And you see the same issues in sales teams. Like I remember a story from about 10 years ago or something with Wells Fargo and their employees were like, under these aggressive sales deadlines, they had to hit certain quotas in a certain amount of time.

And in these jobs and teams, like there’s a lot of pressure and you can often see like what colleagues are up to and what their numbers are and stuff. So it, it drives competition.
And after this works, it’s healthy competition. It, you know, you people want to try and beat each other, but it can also lead to unscrupulous behaviour when deadlines loom.

And in this story, I remember employees actually decided to open up millions of unauthorized bank accounts just to hit their quotas or without customer consent.I had. And so the company faced $185 million in fines.

They then had to pay out an additional several million in compensation to customers and they fired like over 5000 of their employees.
Does that sound like a good situation?
I don’t think so and even they realize that like their whole sales competition and deadlines fiasco was a nightmare that they announced that they were scrapping their controversial sales goals and realize that it caused unnecessary pressure.

Pressure I isn’t sad and deadlines on their employees and it can really backfire. So the question is, why do deadlines screw with us? Well, let me introduce you to Parkinson’s Law.

It’s the little pesky law that states that actually work expands to fill the time available.
So if you give yourself more time to do a task, then those tasks will somehow stretch out and take up more time. But if you give yourself less time, then this induces focus.

So that means if you give yourself three months to do something, it will take you 3 months to do it. But if you give yourself three days to do that same thing, somehow you’ll manage to cram it into three days. It’s weird, but we’re all probably nodding along because this is exactly what happens.

Now. This sounds like a good thing, right? Because by Parkinson’s Law, we should always create imminent deadlines as then somehow we’ll find a way to do the task in less time and we will be super productive and get more done and make more money and symbols, Right.

But the problem is there’s also another bloody law called the Yerkes-Dodson Law. And this explains that there’s actually an optimum level of stress. They call it arousal, but there was an optimum level that you need to reach for peak performance.

So if you have too little stress, this leads to underperformance. For example, you procrastinate, you get sloppy. Yeah, we all know that. Moderate stress, you know, we would as why I’d say that people talk about stress is a bad thing, but moderate stress actually leads to peak performance.

You’re engaged, you’re energized, you’re focused, you’re driven, you’ve got a goal to achieve and it’s achievable.

But then too much stress means leads to performance crashes. So you burn out, you make mistakes and you’re just basically in panic mode.

So these two laws interact with each other. You’ve got Parkinson’s Law in isolation, and this makes us think the less time the better. But then Yerkes-Dodson law reminds us that actually less time increases pressure, which then only works up to a point.

So you’ve got to get it right. So you’ve got to think if your deadline puts you in that optimal stress zone, then great your work efficiently and you’ll be at the most optimum place in your work sharply.

However, if your deadline then tips you into overload, your quality will nosedive.And obviously this is the hard thing about it. And This is why creating goals, creating deadlines, all this sort of stuff take some skill.

And I always say that actually that is often the root of people’s problems and failures. And like, you know, think about even day-to-day classic examples I even see with the entrepreneurs that I work with. For example, let’s take writing A blog post.
Forgive yourself the whole day just to write one blog post.

You’ll procrastinate and you’ll override it and it will take a whole day. You’ll give yourself two hours, you’ll only focus and you’ll nail it and it’ll be amazing quality.
You give yourself 20 minutes, you’ll rush it, you’ll produce some load of crap and like, or you might even just freeze some stress because you’re like, Oh my God, 20 minutes.

So there’s a balance. And it’s the same with launching a product or a website, like a sensible timeline with clear milestones will energize A-Team and it’s very clear and you could set your goals and it’s methodical and productive. But if you create, we must launch in three weeks or else arbitrary deadline.

This leads to panic, to bugs, and inevitably to brand damage and financial loss. So Parkinson’s Law explains why shorter deadlines feel powerful. But Jokes Dodson explains why 2 short deadlines break us, and together they show why fake urgency is dangerous because it pushes us past that sweet spot of pressure into pure chaos.

But as I said, not all deadlines are evil. We absolutely do need them.
Otherwise there’s no sense of urgency and we just won’t get anything done right.
And if we have a deadline, we have less time to procrastinate. We don’t have time to endlessly tinker because let’s face it, somehow I’m always finding a way to make an improvement and I’ll just be there forever.

And they also give us accountability.
So without them, half of our projects would just probably sit in our ideas bank in Ocean or in Google Drive or in the 1700 notes on our iPhone. And yeah, that number isn’t random. That’s actually how many notes I have on my iPhone.

But let’s not get into that right now because that’s a mess. And I want to reiterate that deadlines aren’t the problem per SE. It’s actually how we set them. So I want to make some suggestions for how I make deadlines work for me and how you might be able to benefit from some of the things I’ve learned.

Because I’ve definitely been a victim of arbitrary deadlines and I’m still helping out tonnes of other entrepreneurs get out of bad habits too. But here are some things that I think that have really helped all of us and hopefully they’ll help you too. So first of all, I say don’t set deadlines from ego, set them from reality.

And what I mean by this because people hate go ahead ego, but we all have it.
I really believe that you should not do deadlines so that you’re rushing to prove yourself or beat competitors because it’s usually ends in mistakes that cost more to fix than they save from actually doing this deadline.

So don’t do that. I’d say use soft deadlines for creativity like drafting content or brainstorming ideas because I believe that creativity needs breathing space and flexible timelines protect you from that pressure that kills good ideas. So I think, you know, soft deadlines are good there.

And then use hard deadlines only when there’s something real at stake, like a contract, like a campaign tied to an event. Well, obviously you can’t change the date or something that genuinely risks your reputation. So that way the pressure is justified and the urgency drives quality instead of panic.

Now, the next one I think is really important is building buffer time. Always build buffer time because things always take longer than you think. And say, padding your timeline means setbacks don’t derail the entire project.

Because this is all based on another law, Hofstadter’s law. The law that states the idea that projects always somehow take longer, even when you know they’ll take longer.
And this didn’t even turn into the funny Hofstadter’s law that it actually always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.

It’s kind of wild.
But again, you’re probably resonating with this because like, somehow how does everything take longer? And listen, it’s kind of crazy, but I think, you know, build buffer time in and but then if you’re building buffer time in, somehow it still take longer. Just be prepared for that.

But before you panic whenever you’re creating deadlines, I would like you to ask yourself one question. Is this truly urgent? Or are you somehow just manufacturing stress? Because most headlines feel critical in the moment, but if you pause to sense check the actual urgency, this can stop you spiraling into unnecessary stress.

But I guess the question is when is it worth busting your arse? Because if you listen to my content regularly enough, you know that I’m an advocate for working hard.
Now I don’t like burning out, but I do think that you need to put in the hard work occasionally to get the results you want.

But when is it worth going a bit above and beyond and saying bye to work life balance for a while? And when is it just an arbitrary deadline? Well I think 3 things you think of you would look for when there’s a strategic pay off, When you’ll damage your reputation, maybe if you miss it, or when you’ve signed a contract that’s literally part of the deal.

So I think if there’s those three things, it might be worth busting your ass. But otherwise it’s just you calm down, you have a cuppa, and you go watching Netflix once in a while because the work can likely wait. So my summary to all of this is that deadlines are not bullshit.

But the arbitrary ones, the ego driven ones, the fake urgent ones, That’s where the bullshit lies. Because we need to use deadlines as tools, not as whips, and we need to let them guide us, not suffocate us.

I want you to always ask which deadlines are worth the Sprint and which ones are just stressing you out for no reason.
And that’s it for today’s episode of Sniffing out the bullshit.

But this week I want you to look at your own calendar. Which deadlines are real, which ones are arbitrary, and which ones are pure bullshit that you can drop today?

And please do share your stories with me, because I’d love to hear the most ridiculous deadline that you’ve ever been pressured into. And until next week, please do keep sniffing out the bullshit.