Snoozing Projects

 

“Beep! … Beep! … Beep! …”

The cacophonous sound of the dreaded alarm clock pierced through my tympanic membranes shattering another ‘millionaire dream’ that I was having a moment ago. I wished I could have a gigantic hammer nearby to plunge the final silencing blow to the cussed alarm clock. “Time to wake up”, a voice echoed inside me. Reluctantly, I dragged myself out of the cozy queen-size bed to reach for the ‘Snooze’ button on the clock. I was glad that I have this ingenious snooze function in the new alarm clock that I bought recently (the previous one failed to survive the assault of a flying pillow). “Another five minutes”, I told myself. Then another five minutes after another five minutes and it went on and on…

I was experiencing a strange phenomenon that most people call the ‘Snooze Button Effect’. How could such a nifty invention turn bad? If you google for the keywords ‘Snooze Button Effect’ or ‘Snooze Button Addiction’ you will easily find tons of articles on this topic. One article aptly describes this phenomenon as,

“An occurrence whereby a small press of a button at a given time can supposedly delay an undesirable event from happening for 9 minutes. Contained in these 9 ‘precious’ minutes is an unknown substance that seemingly causes people to be addicted to its delusional effects.”

In general, the snoozing habit is detrimental to sleep health and counterproductive to a fresh start of the day. And yet, many people, including myself, are deadly addicted to it. It is in fact a form of procrastination in disguise that comes with a long list of drawbacks and side effects. I am not going to discuss the side effects here as you may easily find them in most of the articles available in the internet. What I am interested is to explore a similar manifestation of this effect in the field of project management.

Let’s face it. There seems to be an invisible ‘Snooze’ button in every project. Whenever the deadline is near, we are tempted to press the ‘Snooze’ button. “It’s fine to postpone the deadline for a couple of days”, we keep telling ourselves. No harm doing so as we can always crash back the time lost elsewhere isn’t it? Wrong! This is just a willful thinking. Once we start to lay our fingers on the ‘Snooze’ button, there is no turning back. We will just get mired deeper into this perverse addiction. Don’t believe it? Just ask a few project managers around you when was the last time they have altered the deadlines in the Gantt chart.

There are two ways – planned and unplanned – that a project manager may introduce the ‘Snooze’ button in his or her projects. The unplanned way is what I have just described above where the project manager keeps altering the forever fleeting deadlines. This is obviously a lack of control and discipline. There is no incentive for people to stick to the deadlines. To them, deadlines are nothing but a bunch of insignificant dates that are as ephemeral as the morning dew. On the other hand, the planned way is the exact opposite. In this case, various types of buffers are being planted strategically within the project timeline so much so that sometimes it is hard for one to tell when the actual deadline is. This resembles the scenario where a person deliberately set the alarm clock to go off an hour earlier just to keep snoozing on until the actual wake-up time. As we know, adding unnecessary buffers, or more commonly known as paddings, is bad for a project regardless of what reasons we have. Doing this not only unrealistically inflates the project timeline; it also makes it difficult for the project manager to produce any accurate estimation on the project status. So why are project managers still stuck in these padding frenzies? Perhaps, we can understand this a little bit better from the explanation given by Rita Mulcahy in her book “PMP Exam Prep” – “I have no idea how long it will take. I do not even know what I am being asked to do. So, what do I say? I will make my best guess and double it!”

How can we resist the temptation of pressing the ‘Snooze’ button?

Many sleep researchers and therapists around the world have come up with various tips and self-help advices that help people to shake off this baneful habit. Most of these advices try to address the problem by either making it very difficult for people to access the ‘Snooze’ button or, in the extreme case, removing it entirely. For instance, there is this innovative product, Clocky, which is an alarm clock outfitted with wheels that allow it to hide itself in order to force the owner awake in an attempt to find it. Similarly, is it even possible to have the option to postpone deadlines completely removed in projects? If not, are there any ways to make the process much harder to accomplish? For example, will it help if we were to enforce that each amendment of deadline has to be properly documented and approved? Maybe, this is something interesting for the project management gurus out there to think about.

The most important thing is, next time when you are tempted to snooze a project, remember to ask yourself this question – “Is this the only option you have or you’re just addicted?”