This story was in The Guardian today and it states what professional writers have known for a long time. If you can’t keep a deadline, you’re history.
“Scientists studying the psychology of people who leave things to the last minute have found that work that is submitted late tends to be judged more harshly than when a deadline is met.
Work completed late was viewed as significantly lower quality than the same piece of work delivered on time, the study found.
“All the research that we could find looked at how deadlines impact the minds and actions of workers. We wanted to know how a deadline impacts the minds and actions of others when they look at those workers,” said Prof Sam Maglio, a researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
The study surveyed thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, executives, human resources personnel and others, whose jobs included evaluating others.
Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product pitches, photography and news articles. But first, they were told it was either submitted early, on deadline or late.
Late work was consistently rated as worse in quality than when people were told the same work was completed early or on time. The difference was equivalent to including an objective shortcoming such as not meeting a word count.
A missed deadline led evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and they reported they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person.
The latest study suggests that it is the inability to plan realistically that is frowned on, with factors beyond an employee’s control, such as jury duty, not viewed as negatively.”