Think back to a time where you desperately needed help on something. For me, I’m about when I was managing a team and really needed a vendor for a highly specific, ongoing task (think 3-6 months). We had recently gotten a fairly high-profile client (as a reference from another high-profile client), with which this vendor was going to directly interact, so we really wanted to do our due diligence in vetting and contracting this vendor. This task was a fairly niche one, so I knew we’d have an uphill battle from the start. It sucks to say no to this type of opportunity, and I really wanted to impress the team and the client. Ultimately, this would be the downfall: putting pressure on this to work out, whether warranted or not, ended up meaning our potential client had a bad experience.

Thankfully, I had our hiring manager’s help in recruiting and selecting a vendor. Several job postings and interview rounds later, we had two amazing options for our client (or so we thought). Both had decades of experience, a track record of success, and were personable and easy to engage with. We hired them both as part-time contractors and planned to work with the client to select one of the individuals to prepare for a 3-6 month long project.

It’s almost like the second we told the client we’d be able to move forward, the world shifted. The house of cards fell. Mercury went into retrograde. Whatever other metaphors you can think of for the rug being pulled out from under us, that’s what happened.

In some twist of fate, both contractors backed out for one reason or another. Looking back, I know that both of their reasons were valid, and as an employee, I’ve had to back out of projects before, too. All the variables in this context just happened to make for a very uncomfortable call with the client, who we had to inform that we ultimately couldn’t support their request.

It was a costly mistake. Not only did we lose out on this big-name client, we paid for two individuals to be hired and onboarded for what ended up being no return on investment.

This story isn’t unique to that context. In fact, things of that nature (albeit on a much smaller scale) happen regularly, both within that organization and other companies across industries. This isn’t to say there’s nothing to learn from it. The pressure we’d put on ourselves to fulfill this request added unnecessary stress and urgency to the case. Would we have seen the red flags in our candidates from the beginning if we’d had more time to thoroughly vet them? Maybe. Was this something I considered from there on out in hiring for any other positions? Absolutely.

Deadlines are a part of everyone’s lives, pretty much every day of every month of every year. Both at work and at home, I can list at least five deadlines I have to meet in the immediate future. There’s always something waiting to get done—I can’t tell you the amount of times I have been working on a blog post, literature review, or Canva project and rushed to get it done before my unrelated meeting in ten minutes, only to end up going back to that project after the meeting and redoing what I urgently put together anyway. I artificially made a deadline for myself in order to switch tasks at a “good” stopping point. The challenge comes in managing our own expectations for these and not letting the urgency cloud our judgement. The value we glean from our everyday work isn’t in churning out one project after another (though there’s certainly a time and place for getting into that flow state). If you have one takeaway from this post, I’d like it to be: challenge yourself to tease out where your brain artificially adds urgency in your work, how it affects you (if at all!), and what to do about it.

Deadlines are a part of everyone’s lives, pretty much every day of every month of every year. Both at work and at home, I can list at least five deadlines I have to meet in the immediate future. There’s always something waiting to get done—I can’t tell you the amount of times I have been working on a blog post, literature review, or Canva project and rushed to get it done before my unrelated meeting in ten minutes, only to end up going back to that project after the meeting and redoing what I urgently put together anyway. I artificially made a deadline for myself in order to switch tasks at a “good” stopping point. The challenge comes in managing our own expectations for these and not letting the urgency cloud our judgement. The value we glean from our everyday work isn’t in churning out one project after another (though there’s certainly a time and place for getting into that flow state).

If you have one takeaway from this post, I’d like it to be: challenge yourself to tease out where your brain artificially adds urgency in your work, how it affects you (if at all!), and what to do about it.