Mick Jagger was 100 percent wrong. Time is not on my side. No, it’s not, and it’s not on your side either. Whether you have a big budget or a small one, years of experience or just launching your career, work for a stately iconic brand or a brash entrepreneurial start-up, the amount of time that fits into an hour is 60 minutes. While what you do with that hour can move the ball toward your goal line, time will always be every project’s most limiting factor. Welcome to the club.
I learned this important and most enduring lesson in Dr. Benny Barak’s Consumer Behavior class at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York. For our term project, our study group had three weeks to create a mythical product for an existing company and develop a comprehensive business plan to launch our innovation to a selected target demographic. The four of us met one night at a Manhattan bar to start planning our campaign, but somehow, we could never get everyone back together to keep the momentum going. We all had full-time jobs, night classes, significant others, and a surprisingly more limited beer budget than we had anticipated. We struggled to do the research, share intelligence, and gather meaningful contributions from each member of the team. Somehow we produced a final product that was submitted on time; it had to be because it wouldn’t have mattered how good it was if it was turned in late. It would have earned us a failing grade irrespective of our farsighted brilliance.
After handing in the paper, Dr. Barak asked the class for feedback about the assignment. I offered that I didn’t feel we had enough time to do as good a job as we wanted. Consumer Behavior wasn’t our only night class, after all, and everyone had different schedules. We had demanding jobs that often took priority over our academic pursuits, and three weeks was simply not enough time to perfect our plans.
Dr. Barak stroked his professorial salt-and-pepper beard. “Maybe so,” he mused thoughtfully, “but as you advance in your careers, you will never have enough time. You will be forced to get things done in the time you have.” He turned out to be as right as Mick was wrong.
Most of us don’t get to pick our deadlines. The product will launch, the project will be presented, or the game will kick off when the company says it must, and whatever time we get is the time we have. Like my classmates, the colleagues we will count on will have different schedules, different priorities, and different commitments, both professional and personal. As project managers, we are stuck having to deal with all of those competing agendas, and the recognition that not everyone with whom we are working will place the same level of importance on the things that are of the highest priorities to us.
So whatever time you think you have to complete the mission, you should start by imagining that you have less time. You’ll be glad you did when the unforeseen happens, for example, when you must throw away old plans and start over because new variables are introduced, new contingencies need to be developed, and colleagues are slow to respond.
Think of time as an airtight container, and your project as a gas. One of the properties of a gas is that it fills the container it occupies. Somehow, the work you have to do always fills the time you have to do it in, even if you started out earlier than you originally thought would be necessary. Increase the work to be done with the new details to be resolved and it is like pumping more gas into the container. The pressure increases. Now think about shrinking the container and the amount of time remaining to complete the project, instead. The pressure will rise again. Increase the work and shrink the time at the same time, and the pressure doubles. You may be headed for a blowout.
I don’t like that kind of pressure in my life, so I always try to make my container bigger than is typically necessary. That is, when possible, I allot more time than might be required for just about any task so I can handle the pressure when the time gets shorter, or the workload gets heavier than I expected. I used to think that made me “time’s bitch” because I always felt the pressure of time. I leave for the airport at least two hours before my flight boards even though a problem-free commute takes less than an hour. I imagine there may be even more New York traffic than normal, an accident on the route, a problem parking in the closest garage, or an extra-long line at the security checkpoint.
I’d rather grab a cup of coffee and work in the airline club than worry about catching my flight when a thunderstorm floods the Long Island Expressway and traffic slows to a crawl. So maybe, just maybe, I’m not “time’s bitch” after all. Maybe I’m “time’s boss” because imagining that I always need more time to get to the airport helps me stay more in control, more nimble, and less pressured when something goes wrong on my drive over. I’ve never missed a flight yet. Take that, time!
I’m not expecting or asking you to be as mindful of time as I am in everything you do. In fact, I recognize and accept that most people are not. Many of us default to getting to the airport at the latest possible moment or to the movies just as the lion starts to roar. Different strokes. But, sometimes our worlds collide . . .
A lonely dawn had broken in Detroit as the Super Bowl XL event team straggled into the conference room at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center. Every day during the three weeks leading up to the game, we scheduled morning briefing meetings at our headquarters hotel before everyone dispersed to the stadium or to other meetings and event sites around town. The events team and at least one senior representative from each functional area participated, including: stadium operations, construction, security, media relations, broadcasting, transportation, accommodations, hospitality, team and medical services, and host city operations. Respecting the early hour and everyone’s time, we usually set out a selection of breakfast pastries, fresh fruit, and several gallons of overpriced hotel coffee.
In Jacksonville, the year prior, two meetings were held daily, one first thing in the morning and one around 12 or 13 hours later. Neither started remotely on time, but the evening session was always the most delayed as staff in the field were often wrapped up in important work that delayed their arrival. Because the time between the end of the evening meeting and the follow-up meeting the next morning was rather uneventful, I decided to restructure the daily meetings. Our new plan was to host one meeting at the beginning of the day, which would start with updates on the status of any problems discussed the previous day and would be followed by a round-robin of reports from each area that surfaced new issues and announced changes to the plan.
On the first day of these newly structured meetings, I was in place at 7:00 a.m. with a small handful of our team at the folding tables arranged in the form of an elongated rectangle. Most of our team was either chatting collegially outside the room, just leaving their hotel rooms, or still detailing their hair into the perfectly coiffed uncoiffed coiffure. Apparently, the first subject of the first meeting, when it finally began at 7:10 a.m., was going to be the necessity of starting our meetings on time.
The next morning, there were five of us sitting around the table set for 30 people. At precisely 7:00 a.m., I closed the door and started the meeting with a handful of reasonably important announcements in a normal voice. Another half-dozen teammates—who were milling about in the room or were gathered at the coffee station right outside the door—quickly took their seats as we launched into follow-up items from the day before. The rest of the gang arrived over the next 10 to 15 minutes, many chattering to each other until they entered the room, surprised that they were interrupting a meeting in progress.
I grabbed a second cup of coffee a few minutes before 7:00 a.m. on Day 3, and noticed the urn was only half full. The vast majority of our team was already caffeinated, seated, and ready for the meeting. A handful of sheepish stragglers entered quietly after the door was closed and took their places.
Day 4 and beyond, latecomers were the exception rather than the rule. Not only did we never start that meeting late or without the room filled with very nearly the entire complement of participants until game day, but the same could be said for the years that followed.
I sat in my usual spot ten minutes before the meeting, a steaming cup of black coffee within convenient reach, reading my notes from the previous day’s briefing, and outlining additional topics to be covered. Magically, when everyone’s iPhones approached 7:00 a.m., the din of conversation in the room diminished to silence all by itself. I could tell it was time to start without ever glancing at my watch. Assuming the meeting took the same amount of time, regardless of whether it started at 7:00 a.m. or 7:10 a.m., imagine how much productive time we added to the system across 30 colleagues? Thirty people, ten minutes at a time, every single day. That’s a total of more than 100 people-hours over the course of three weeks.
It wasn’t intended as a power trip (although I admit it did seem pretty effective), but rather a drive toward changing our department’s culture by respecting not only our own time, but that of others, and wringing out all of the efficiency we could in the hour we were together. A 48-minute hour is simply less productive than a full 60-minute hour, and I’m not alone in thinking that way.
New York Giants former head coach Tom Coughlin’s meeting policy was even tougher than mine. In 2004, the New York Times reported that two Giants players who had arrived a few minutes early to a team meeting were fined $1,000 each. On another occasion, defensive great Michael Strahan found the team’s meeting room door closed two minutes before the scheduled start time and was also rewarded with a fine notice. Coach Coughlin, apparently, believed that “meetings start five minutes early.” As for me, I’m good with “right on time.”
The start time of our meeting was essentially a deadline, the time for participants to be ready to start discussing how we as a team were delivering against every other deadline. We demonstrated the importance of meeting deadlines by making the start time definitive, reliable, and inviolate; missing that deadline was a stigma. In labor negotiations and congressional budget deliberations, there seems to be more posturing than progress until a deadline for action has nearly arrived. Often, little happens even when there is a deadline. The penalties for missing deadlines can include a disruptive work stoppage or a government shutdown, but the penalty during the American Civil War was far more severe. Diaries and news reports from that time describe a physical line or a ditch drawn around a prison camp—a “dead line”—as a physical boundary that a prisoner best not attempt to cross under the penalty of being shot. Most deadlines are not literally life-and-death, but I still try really, really hard not to cross them.
During my NFL career, the most sacrosanct deadline of all was on the first Sunday in February at 6:28:30 p.m. Eastern Time. That was usually the time for the opening kickoff of the Super Bowl, conceived so the broadcaster could generate the greatest viewing audience and the highest ratings in two half-hour segments, the one before and the one after 6:30 p.m. I wasn’t one to argue against that strategy, as the game’s stratospheric viewership ratings justified the $5 million NBC charged for a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl LII broadcast in 2018. Our collective job was to make sure everything we did, at every second of that day, led up to an on-time delivery.
Although most Super Bowl deadlines were less micro-precise, they were still important because, come hell or high water, it was nearly 100 percent certain that the game was going to be played on the first Sunday of February, not Monday or Tuesday, and not on the second Sunday of February. Every deadline for every task that was crucial to being ready for a kickoff at 6:28:30 p.m. was essential to identify and communicate to the team. For leaders, they were even more important to model and enforce. Set deadlines for yourself and respect them, and the others you count on will follow suit.
Keeping things fresh, adjusting to the needs and demands of the marketplace, and progress are all good things. When I work on an event held annually, I always try to add things that are new or different to the product, or better ways of doing things than the year before. There is always room for improvement and growth, even for something already “on its own level.”
Super Bowl XLIV, held on February 7, 2010, was originally scheduled to be staged in a new spectacular stadium to be built for the New York Jets on the west side of Manhattan. But the game was moved to South Florida when plans for building the new venue were abandoned after New York City failed in its bid to host the Olympics. The new site was a natural choice because it wasn’t so new at all. It would be the region’s tenth time in 44 years to host a Super Bowl; almost one-quarter of all Super Bowls ever played were played in South Florida. Also, it was just three years since the last time (ninth time) the region hosted a Super Bowl in 2007.
But, being just 36 months later, we didn’t want to stage a repeat of the exact same experience. Instead of basing the majority of the non-game activities in Miami, 15 miles south of the stadium, we decided to move our base of operations and the focal point of non-game-day festivities to the neighboring beach city of Fort Lauderdale, 20 miles in the other direction. That decision resulted in having to set aside an enormous amount of additional time and human resources to re-imagine a new operations plan before real planning could begin. This was not unusual for the Super Bowl. It moves every year to a different place. But, it was definitely unusual to have the event in South Florida without being centered in Miami.
Of course, introducing innovation into a system doesn’t have to involve moving an entire city’s worth of events into a new neighborhood. It can be manifest in introducing a new size and type of product packaging, rolling out a new app, or setting up a new distribution system. Constantly injecting innovation into your product, service, system, or presentation is essential to the health of your project and the vitality of your brand. Every time you try something new to improve the system or unlock value, you will naturally be introducing new uncertainties and exposing your brand to new risks. Innovation, simply, takes a great deal more time—and well it should. You and your team will need every precious moment not only to develop and create new project features, but sufficient time to comprehensively imagine the implications of introducing something new and to develop the Plan B’s if things don’t go right.
Innovation is most often an evolving process. A new idea changes and is reshaped repeatedly to fit emerging challenges, and as it does, it consumes time and attention that wasn’t required before. Imagine newness and opportunity whenever and wherever you can, but also consider the time you’ll need to effect that change. If you think about how many times you can recall hearing the phrase “we’ll put doing that off until next year,” you know I’m right. Eventually, next year becomes this one.
Whether introducing innovation or just more fully exposing the risks that were already there, you can be sure that once you start imagining the things that could go wrong, you’ll discover an unsettling sensitivity to imagined disasters that will continue throughout the planning process, and probably into execution. I apologize in advance for the loss of sleep. It’s not to convince you of impending failure. It’s to give you confidence that by investing the time into imagining the worst, you will more often come out ahead. With a growing repertoire of things that could possibly go wrong, where then do you begin to imagine how to make them go right?