Patrick Mosher shares two stories about deadline failures: Purdue students who missed a 12 pm Thursday deadline and got a zero despite a late-submission policy, and his team missing a midnight proposal cutoff by fifteen minutes after spending $100,000. He argues deadlines signal work ethic and reliability, and learning this lesson in college prevents costly professional mistakes.
Chapters
But today's topic has to do with deadlines. Now, the moment after you said, "I feel good about the freedom I have," and I'm gonna talk about deadlines, John. So deadlines. So, you know, we talk about setting deadlines, but we know what deadlines look like. Again, story with this. When I was teaching— and you'll— this is so good. Someday you'll teach, you know, you'll go back to school and teach folks. I was teaching career readiness at Purdue, and the class had an assignment that they had to interview an alum and then write it up, and then they had to submit it by 12 o'clock on Thursday. On a Thursday. It was worth 100 points. It was a lot of points for the course. I mean, like, you missed this and you're going to drop a letter grade. And this is like a 1-credit easy A, basically attendance, do the work, you get the A, right? No, no grading on quality at all. Okay, so I, I got there on Thursday, and then everybody turned in that night. The following Thursday, 2 of the women in my class who are star students, sat up front. There's 60— no, 90 people in that class. They sat up front and they were always there, ask a lot of questions, star students. Came up to them and they said, um, Professor Mosher, we tried to submit our report. It was like 12:05 on, on, you know, Thursday night, and the portal was closed, so we didn't know why. So We're just letting you know that we'd like to turn it in. I was like, no. They're like, what do you mean no? It's like, well, 12:05 means it actually was Friday. The syllabus says if you turn it in late, you can get half credit if you inform the instructor 24 hours. This is a week later. You lost all the points for this thing. and I could just see, you know, these two A students, like 3.8 GPAs, looking at a 1-credit B. Their faces were just like, I hate you. You know, this wasn't about like policy or syllabus. This is like, I did this to them. Right. And I was like, so I said, a story within a story. I said, look, I was on a proposal once and we were putting this together and we easily spent $100,000 of resources to put this proposal together. Customer portal closed at 12 o'clock midnight and we didn't turn it in and we were ready to go at 12:15. And I'll just share this with you, probably some partner was going like, the font size is wrong, we have flicker on the PowerPoint. So we had to fix that and then we turned it in at— well, tried to turn 12:15, the portal closed. And we called up the guy, the customer, the next day, and they literally said, this is an indicator of how you do the work. The answer is no. I said, I am so glad for you two that you learned that lesson now instead of when there's a lot at stake, a million dollars at stake. Those two students literally were like, Thank you. They appreciated the story. They appreciated that they learned that lesson. And actually, I maintained relationship with one of those for the remainder of her career. She's actually just sent— she— I got an email from her last night. So, you know, and she graduated last May. So, you know, so we're still in contact. Um, tough feedback, but she learned, right? And, and what better place to learn than in college than you know, on the job. So deadlines do matter. And sometimes they don't matter enough.
