1001: Managing Deadlines + Stress

Scott and Wes tackle the all-too-real stress of crunch time as a web developer—how to handle looming deadlines, avoid sloppy shortcuts, and stay methodical when everything feels like it’s falling apart. They share practical tips on planning, communicating, cutting scope, asking for help, and preventing the chaos from happening again next time. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:53 The Importance of Planning and Organization. 05:16 Slow Down, Take a Step Back. 06:05 Identifying and Managing Tasks. 08:35 The Role of Communication in Project Management. 11:24 Cutting Features and Managing Expectations. 14:52 The Balance Between Perfectionism and Productivity. 16:42 Getting To Work. 19:31 Updating Tools and Issues As You Go. 22:34 Asking for Help. 25:29 Prevention. 30:22 Communicate Clearly. 32:57 Brought to you by Sentry.io. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. We got an amazing question in our inbox all about how did you deal with the stress of meeting a hard deadline when you're behind on work and tickets are coming in? And we're going to be taking this entire episode to answer that question, talk about the stress of work, dealing with this stress and making sure that this doesn't happen again. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 0:30Wes Bos?

  Yes, this is a great question. Thank you to whoever submitted it. If you have other questions for us that you want us to answer, go to syntax.fm/potluck and we'll answer on an upcoming episode. Usually we put them all on a single show, but I thought that this one would make a nice tidy, quick little episode about deadlines and stress and whatever. I think everybody feels that, you know, I just wish I had a bit more time, or I just wish I could get more done in the time that I do have.

• 0:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? It's very funny that like this feels like something we could have talked about four or five times on this show, and we've never done an episode on this specific topic. Despite it being something that I feel like all of us have dealt with in our professional careers, I used to actually work at a lot of agencies. So I know, you know, there's all kinds of different entryways and pathways in this industry. And for me, I worked at three different sizes of agencies from a small time agency where I was one of two devs to a little bit larger where I was one of five devs and then a massive agency where I was one of, I don't even know how many devs because it was like a 2,000 person agency. So yeah, I gotta

• 1:37Scott Tolinski?

  say, I feel like I've run the gamut on fast moving projects, hard deadlines, things that need to get done. And I feel like I have some good advice here, but also like, you know, we just did this mad CSS thing. And that was a whole team project, right? Our whole mad CSS tournament. And we said, we're going to do this to coincide with March Madness, which that's a hard deadline to say, okay, let's do a March Madness. And you would not believe how fast everything snuck up on you, whether that is building an entire competitive coding platform, or Wes, you built a bracket site. We had merch, we had all these needs and stuff like that.

• 2:15Wes Bos?

  Getting jackets made, yeah.

• 2:16Scott Tolinski?

  It there's

• 2:17Wes Bos?

  Sneaks up on you so quick. It's unbelievable. But also, I almost prefer a hard deadline like that because it is so easy to say, ah. We'll push it to next week, you know, and then things never get done. And you look at some of these companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and whatever, just shipping like crazy right now. And you have to think like, man, first, those people are probably not getting good sleeps. And it is probably nuts and they for sure are working weekends and all that stuff. But also, I'm sure they have lots of good tips or whatever to move at the speed that they are.

• 2:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know, it is funny to hear like, uh, stories from the gaming industry about game developers like really big, brutal schedules, especially towards the end of of game things. And and you got to feel like so much of that could be solved with better process and better planning and organization. But what do I know? I've never built a video game before. I'm sure it's very hard and there's a lot of work involved. But you do hear about that. And I know that there are some folks that that is their kind of entire existence in this industry is constantly getting pushed by deadlines. I feel like I've had a job that was like that before as well. There's also other jobs that had hard deadlines and the team respected each other and everybody did their their share fair fair share share fair and

• 3:37Scott Tolinski?

  got it done in the time that was acquired or allotted for this. So, um, what can happen if you're under a tight deadline? Well, magic can happen, as you said, right? You can get stuff done. But you can also have mistakes. You can have costly mistakes, stakes that end up being what their security holes or something like that, because you're just trying to get this thing done. Maybe you end up having, you know, a lovable sized hole where you have all of your customers' public chats public. Who knows, right?

• 4:09Wes Bos?

  But is that what happened? I didn't even catch up on that. Lovable had all their chats public?

• 4:14Scott Tolinski?

  Lovable, you know, it, the lovable thing was really frustrating because they basically were when it was announced that their there was like customer chats and information were public. And somebody was like, I, I told them about this several months ago and they didn't do anything. And then they were basically came out and said, we did not suffer our data breach. Our documentation of what is public is unclear, basically saying like, we didn't tell you that your chats would be public. Like clearly enough. So therefore we're not at fault for them being public, which, oh, yeah, it's slimy.

• 4:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it looks like their JSON API was was public and you're able to find the different messages from people. Man.

• 5:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Wes Bos?

  That should not.

• 5:05Scott Tolinski?

  They had to come out with a second statement. We're sorry, our initial statement didn't properly address our mistake. Okay. Well, you know what you're doing. Okay, so bad practices, you know, costly mistakes. What do you do? How do you prevent this? I think the hardest and most beneficial thing you could possibly do in a scenario where you are stressed to the gills about a deadline is to slow down and take a step back, which I hate that. I hate that advice. I hate that when I'm like stressed out about stuff and Courtney's like, did you do your to do list and break it? I was like, no, I'm just trying to get it done, but I know that's gonna be helpful.

• 5:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Scott Tolinski?

  No time to plan and slow down. And it's the right call every time. It's just like when they say deep breathing is the best thing for you and you're just like, I don't want to deep breathe. Let me deep breathe.

• 6:00Scott Tolinski?

  It always works, folks. The stuff that always works is always no fun to do. But yeah, slow down. I think the biggest thing you can do here is take stock of what actually needs to get or what's actually done currently and what's not. Anytime I end up having a deadline, that's one of the first things I do is I like go through where are we at today? Like what exists and just get a real good handle on exactly what the lay of the land is. Take a step back. Here's what exists.

• 6:28Wes Bos?

  And that could be using something like like linear or some sort of like issue tracking system, some Kanban board. It could be simply just like like writing it down in a Notion document that says, this is what we've done. This is what we need to get done. And like for me, when I'm stressed out, just simply just writing it down, putting them in like I use a to do system. And I just love, I always say out of your head into your system. And as long as once it's there, you can you can go, okay, at least at least I see what needs to be done. And I can start tackling or breaking them down or just like taking a step back and looking at what all those pieces are.

• 7:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's such a big thing to get it out of your head because part of like what is attributing or contributing to the stress of it all is this like looming cloud of unknowns like what do I like, oh, I have this big thing that's hanging over me. What do I have to do here? Actually, like I get maybe the big picture, I get the assignment, I get the end result, but individually files, sections, designs, like what do I have to do? So making, making a plan at this point, like you said, out of your head into your system is the most impactful thing you can do for yourself. And I'm an optimistic person by nature.

• 7:49Scott Tolinski?

  So it's, and Wes, you know this from working with me, I often just think, well, get done, you know?

• 7:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Scott Tolinski?

  And you can't, you have to be very realistic about all of the little pieces that need to get done.

• 8:01Wes Bos?

  You have one thing that says here is uncover questions you might have about the spec or needs. And this is a big one for me as well, because when you get talking about it, when you start trying to write things down, that's when the questions start popping up like, oh, how are we going to do X, Y, and Z? How, how is this feature going to work? Um, how do these things relate to each other? How is the integration working? Who, who is going to be deploying this thing? You know, like there's all these like little pieces that you may not have considered, but when you start putting them into a system, then you start to surface them.

• 8:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, or yeah, even that planning, I remember when I worked at Ford, we needed to get legal approval before installing anything. And I remember we were like up late on a weekend trying to knock out a project. And it was like, oh, we need this library, but we can't get legal's approval for it. And everything's due on Monday, but we didn't plan well enough, so we don't have legal's approval and we can't have this done by Monday. So we're just gonna have to rewrite the library basically ourselves or hack something together in time, because we didn't plan well enough to know that that was something that we would need. And if you were to sit down ahead of time and be like, here's the plan, we're doing this, this, this, this, this.

• 9:16Scott Tolinski?

  You might say, okay, here's the library needs that we have. Let's get legal approval or even like API access. Like, can you imagine if you're, you're again, especially like if you're working on the weekend or something to knock these things out and you don't have access to the one thing that you need to solve a problem. I know that's happened to a lot of folks, uh, because those are the types of things that you identify when you're getting into it. But if you're planning out and you're reading this spec or whatever it is, or you're, you're going over in your head, maybe you're writing your own, uh, spec or you're, you're getting through everything and what the needs are, you uncover those little edges that you might not have thought about when you're just looking at the big picture of it all.

• 9:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah. The worst is when like, you're like, oh, I can't do that because there's something else in front of it. Like one example for us was we wanted to move the syntax CSS platform, um, over to the syntax domain name. And

• 10:10Scott Tolinski?

  Seems easy enough on the, on the, yeah.

• 10:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Throw it on some domain, but it ended up being like, it has to be on CloudFlare workers. So, but shoot, we have the syntax CloudFlare account doesn't actually have the syntax domain name in because that was still on my account. So, okay, now

• 10:29Scott Tolinski?

  And I don't have access to your

• 10:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you don't have access. So, okay, let's move the syntax domain name from my account to the, the syntax CloudFlare account. Oh, now we need to change the name servers. Somebody else has access to the domain name at Sentry, right? So we gotta find them and they gotta, they gotta figure out who has logged into that and then they gotta update the name servers. Um, and then we move that over. Oh, now the, the app is failing because, um, the free plan on CloudFlare only gives you 10 milliseconds per request and, and we needed the like 40 milliseconds because we're going, just going over it and they were failing. Oh, now we gotta request a credit card. I'll just pay for it myself. You know, it's like all these things just stack in front of it. I was like, man, if I Would have done this moving the domain name over two years ago.

• 11:18Wes Bos?

  We would not have been having this problem.

• 11:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Wes Bos?

  So those things just stack in front of each other.

• 11:24Scott Tolinski?

  I know. After, after you're getting through it, I would be methodical in your planning system. Like, or I, I think personally, you know, I think different people work different ways, but I, I like to get really deep with my planning and like really outline things because even in like code, I don't know if you'd like to do this sometimes, Wes, but when you have like a really intense coding problem, I'll like kind of write out the logic in comments and then fill in the code in those comments later. So for me, this is kind of like that where you're like filling in the to do. Yeah. It's the same way that people write an outline before writing, I suppose. I'm a terrible author, right?

• 11:57Wes Bos?

  And now we're just making the bots do the same thing. Turns out, planning is applicable in every single aspect of life.

• 12:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah. I know. It's like, people are like, I gotta become a project manager. Brother, you already were. Oh, another thing I like about with the planning things is that like, you can have items that are blocked. Like if your system is good, you could say this item is blocked by this item, or this item is needed for this, and then this, and then this. And then therefore you're pretty much just given a straight list of, all right, knock out this, knock out this, knock out this. And then you just go down the list until it's all done. And it make, to me personally, it's motivating to, to check stuff off, to say, okay, I got this done. Ra ra ra, let's go. I'm 20% done. Let's go.

• 12:45Wes Bos?

  The dopamine hit from checking something off. Have you ever added something to your list just to check it off? Or added an issue just to check it off? I do that all the time. It feels good.

• 12:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Record syntax. I'm adding it to my list right now so I can check it out.

• 13:01Scott Tolinski?

  I'm quite literally doing that.

• 13:02Wes Bos?

  See what you got done.

• 13:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. I think part of this too, you also have figure out what can be cut in here. And that's something I think that's important too, because it depends on how hard this deadline is, right?

• 13:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah. It's, you have all these grand ideas of absolutely everything you'd like to have in every single feature you'd like to implement. But when it comes down to. Is this worth my time? Like, is 1% of the users actually going to be using this feature? And that's going to push us back? Simply what can be cut? And I think like, we talk about all these like, big AI companies shipping so fast right now. If you really look into a lot of these projects, you're realizing like, the reason they are shipping so quickly is because it is, it's not very polished and a lot of the like, features have been, been totally cut, right?

• 13:52Wes Bos?

  Like, I remember when OpenAI launched their like, apps SDK, which was like their like MCP thing. It was, everyone was like, oh wow, they released an SDK and everybody's talking about it. And I was actually using it and I was like, this is not very like, done. You know, they, they cut a lot of stuff and that was simply just so they could announce the thing and say that they're coming out there before some other LLM company announces their own apps SDK. They needed to get something out in time because there was a tight deadline. And they figured out what can be cut, which was most of it. And they've since added those features in after the fact, but they needed it to get out in time.

• 14:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, whatever happened to, you know, the, who's it? Miyamoto from Nintendo said that a, a bad game is bad forever. And just basically, I know, I think it's like, once we were able to update software after it was released, people just started shipping broken stuff, you know?

• 14:47Wes Bos?

  Fix it in post.

• 14:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, fix it in post, classic, fix it in post. So you've made your plan.

• 14:53Wes Bos?

  I, I think, sorry, I think there's like, there's an upside to that as well as cutting things as well because, yeah, there's so many, this is not a problem I have, but there are so many perfectionists out there that will simply just never ship anything. They'll never put their thing out there to the world because they wish that it was, it was perfect. And I think, like, I was talking to my wife about this yesterday, just about some stuff that she's doing. And she's like, I just want to like, sit down and make a plan and do all this stuff. And then also, a lot of people, she's, she's not as, I'm not saying this is her, but like, a lot of people are also perfectionists on the other side of it as well. So you have this huge planning aspect and you have this huge, like, perfectionist aspect.

• 15:37Wes Bos?

  And then you have the actual doing the work in between. And then it, it all just balloons and nothing ever gets shipped. And like, I am very much.

• 15:47Wes Bos?

  In the more in the middle where I I do some planning and I do some perfectionist polish. But my my, I I think the reason why I think I put so much stuff out there is because I I spend a bit more time on the middle and that's both in a positive and a negative.

• 16:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, same thing. Yeah, same for me. I I had a buddy. It was actually when I was in the music school. I had a buddy who would like over the course of like two years released one song and it was really good, a really good song.

• 16:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Scott Tolinski?

  And in that time, I probably released like forty five songs. And I would say, you know, three of mine were good, four or five, six of them were good. And the rest were bad. But like, I think it's just different approaches. I've never been the perfectionist. I've been always a producer and like move on to the next one. The next one will be better with will gain skills or whatever. Sometimes, though, you got to be able to finish stuff, which is one thing that I love this podcast. It forces me to finish something every single week. So next thing here is to get to work. You have your plan. You have everything you need. You've uncovered any type of blocker or question that could possibly come up. Now you can get to work, which is the thing that a lot of people just start with.

• 16:59Scott Tolinski?

  I think the important things here are to not let your standards slip. I think something that we've all encountered is a situation where we've taken a shortcut and that shortcut has come back to bite us and we have to spend time then undoing that shortcut. Yeah, I I feel like there are some shortcuts that are calculated risks that do pay off.

• 17:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Scott Tolinski?

  But there are times when we take these shortcuts and later you're just like, I should have just done it right the first time. I should have just authored this by hand, etc., or whatever.

• 17:32Wes Bos?

  I it's so, this is happening a lot more because it's so easy to just boop, boop, boop, type in the box. Claude ships it and then before you know it, you've just like, why did I do that? Or even just like, why did I, a lot of my open source stuff, I'm like, why did I merge this? You know, at the time I was like, oh, that's sweet. Yeah, merge. And then I'm just like, ah, now I have this big burden that I need to maintain and. Should have done it.

• 18:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So have those standards in place. It's even better if your system that you have with your team, whether that's, you know, your linting and tests and whatever, it's even easier if those things are blocking your follies for you because if, if you can sidestep some of those systems or whatever, and you can let your standards slip, but if you can't get something merged until you end up fulfilling requirements, no any, no casting, whatever you end up doing, then yeah, then, then it's easy to just let those standards slip. And you can't, you can't do that because that code then has to live there forever. Someone's gonna have to clean it up later. Who knows?

• 18:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I, I totally agree with that as well. Because like, at some points, I think it's fine to, to let those things go, especially because like, if you have too much process, that's blocking you from actually shipping anything or doing anything, then it just becomes like, you just, you have, you foster this place where nobody actually moves quickly, because you have just like too much like, ah, I, I don't want to do X, Y, and Z, because now it's gonna take me a hundred years to just even get this thing running in local dev, or, or just like, ah, like the tests are flaky and they're failing, you know? And that's probably more a look on your actual, your tooling as well.

• 19:30Scott Tolinski?

  Your system, yeah. One, one thing again is to update your tools and issues as you go and communicate clearly. It's even better if your people who are monitoring your progress on this can monitor those things as well. So that way they're not having to bother you. Where's this at? What's going on? And it depends on what the deadline is. Is the deadline, you know, 12 hours from now? Is the deadline two weeks from now? I think communicating early and often is always going to be better, but communicating clearly. I, I really like having even like for projects, I guess, I like making change logs. I know that's not exactly a rare practice, but I like having change logs that I could just give to a project

• 20:13Scott Tolinski?

  manager to say, here's, here's the updates as they're coming in. And that's commit names, conventional commits or otherwise.

• 20:22Wes Bos?

  It's true. And even for yourself, like updating your to-dos, checking them off, that gives you, those small wins make huge momentum. And then you're like, you're unstoppable. Like when we were cranking on the Sinhacks platform and all the mad CSS stuff, it was just like, we just had such a good flow of like, bam, log the issue. When something happens, log the issue. Somebody takes it, somebody fixes it, pushes it, you know, just like sometimes it, some of these things were just so small that it would be like five, 10 minutes in between pull requests. But like, that was such a good flow, rather than just like, hmm, I'm gonna work on it today and figure out what's wrong. It's just like, there's 80

• 21:06Wes Bos?

  things, I'm just doing one every 10 minutes for like 12 hours straight and get, just crushing them, getting them done.

• 21:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then, does, like, that system, like, can be, it can be GitHub issues, it can be, like, we said, like, linear to-dos, it can be all kinds of stuff, just something that you will actually use. You know what I would actually really love, Wes? I would love, in regards to that dopamine hit, I would love something on my computer that just tells me how great of a job I'm doing every time I commit code.

• 21:39Wes Bos?

  A back patter?

• 21:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Great PR. You can kill this.

• 21:44Wes Bos?

  Nice job. Unbelievable. That's actually a great idea.

• 21:49Scott Tolinski?

  You did it.

• 21:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I would love that.

• 21:53Wes Bos?

  How could we make that?

• 21:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Wes Bos?

  It's gotta be hardware. You gotta build something that's hardware, like 3D printed, that pats you on the back, and it like, has like webhooks.

• 22:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Wes Bos?

  All tests pass.

• 22:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we gotta make that. Maybe for Hack Week.

• 22:11Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, Hack Week. Add it as a Hack Week project. Yeah. I wanna do this now.

• 22:17Wes Bos?

  A back patterned.

• 22:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Oh, yeah. The hype man. Yeah, you're so good at this.

• 22:27Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's great.

• 22:29Scott Tolinski?

  Claude could never do that.

• 22:30Wes Bos?

  Um, yeah.

• 22:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, okay, I could just keep going forever on these folks.

• 22:33Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable.

• 22:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, sometimes you have to ask for help. Uh, I don't know how many projects you've been in, Wes, but I've been in many projects where it's very clear that, maybe not many, but I've been in enough projects where it's very clear that like, there's just not enough manpower, uh, in these two hands to, uh, get this thing done. So I've had to enlist the help of others. I've had others enlist the help of me. I remember one time we had, I'll keep referencing stuff at Ford because this seemed like, uh, something that happened there a lot. But somebody was let go from our team and there's three developers. Uh, they, this was actually very scary. We were in a meeting with Ford executives and we each had three projects to work on. Each of us had one and the guy who went first presented the first day and they tore his down so badly that he got let go that day.

• 23:20Scott Tolinski?

  And then, uh, the next guy was presenting the next day and then me. Uh, and, uh, the next guy and I, uh, his name is Jeff. He and I were just like, uh, because if it were to the neither of us going first, we probably would have gotten canned too. Cause I think the expectations weren't made clear what they were actually looking for. And so, uh, Jeff and I spent all, all night cranking this thing out, just all night. And, and got it done and killed it. And likewise he helped me and we, we just made sure we, we executed and we kept that job for a while. But like, uh, sometimes you gotta ask for help. It's just straight up. Sometimes asking for help can slow you down.

• 24:02Scott Tolinski?

  If you have to onboard somebody, they gotta get all, you know, set up with whatever the database is or keys or whatever. Like, are you gonna be having to teach them the system?

• 24:11Wes Bos?

  Questioning everything, you know? Why are we not doing it this way?

• 24:15Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, yeah.

• 24:15Wes Bos?

  Please. I, it's in some cases, I guess that's, that's fine. Like it's good to talk through choices, but many other cases, it's just like, please, we're trying to get this done. We're not here to like, yeah, debate like validation libraries.

• 24:28Scott Tolinski?

  It depends on the timeline too, right? If that timeline is 24 hours or something that's different than like a month, uh, but even then, yes, we're. We're not here to debate, hey, can I get a handle on the hand on this, whatever. I think a big thing is like knowing when that's going to help you and when that's going to hurt you. Is something that only you can know the dynamics of your team, everybody else's workload, what you have to do, what you need to accomplish. But I think the the clearest thing is asking for help in a way that it clearly communicates what you need. I think clear communication is a big topic here, but it's like, hey, I'm not going to get this thing done. I really need help. Is there any hours you can help to knock out the following features? If I assign you these GitHub issues, can you do them?

• 25:11Scott Tolinski?

  To me, that is so much more powerful than, hey, can you get a hand, can you hand on this?

• 25:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Scott Tolinski?

  And just help me code it like assign them issues, project manage a little bit, whatever. Do these following things. Oh, which of these things do you want to do? Which of these things can you do quickly, easily, whatever? And then let them get to work and accomplish that stuff. Let's talk about prevention because this is one that I think some people will have a really hard time with. Because I know there are some work environments where, of course, the management is not supportive or there is no.

• 25:45Scott Tolinski?

  Care.

• 25:45Wes Bos?

  Prevention of what? What are you, what are you talking about here?

• 25:48Scott Tolinski?

  Prevention of crunch time. Cause a lot of the stuff with deadlines is almost always like the stress around it isn't from having a deadline or from having something get done. It's feeling like you don't have enough time to get the thing done, or you don't have enough capability to get the thing done in time. Right?

• 26:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, quite honestly, this is sometimes just like a person problem, you know, like I, some of my kids, they have homework. And they just leave it to the last day before and they're all stressed out about it. And it's like, we had a whole week, like whenever I did projects in school, I always tried to have it done. One day before it was, it was actually due. So you have that one buffer day in case anything goes wrong. And then I have all these friends that were like up at like four in the morning before it was due at eight, just stressing out about it. It's like. Just move your entire life 12 hours ahead and you might be a little bit better off.

• 26:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think so. This is there's two parts to this, right? There's as a manager, how do you make sure that people do that? But then there's also as the person who's under crunch time, is it something that you can improve your process on start earlier, plan better and have a clearer idea of what needs to get done? So that way you're not scrambling at the last minute. That's number one. But let's say I've been in enough situations where especially in the agency world, the design, the developer is the last person at the end of the train. So let's say in January, they declare that the project is going to be finished in March. Okay. And that design will be finished by the end of January and then development can take from February to the end of March, right?

• 27:29Scott Tolinski?

  Well, design ended up going through several more revisions and next thing you know, you don't even get to start development until March. And now you've got like half the time you were supposed to have to build the thing. So sometimes that process is unfair to the developer, especially if that is the last process in the in the chain here. So I think it is important to clearly communicate what you need with management in a way that isn't like angry or gonna put people in a defensive position. But it's important to be honest and clear with your communication, especially if you're able to have those types of conversations, which honestly, I feel like that is something that you should be able to establish.

• 28:13Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know, developers are hard with this sometimes with communication, but you could say things like, hey, I'd really prefer in the future, if we had solid deadlines for X, so that way I'm not getting crunched at the end. Okay? Or to be cognizant of that, right? Or a a better process in integration or collaboration would help me work faster with smoother results. Can we can we talk about like what that is, right? Can we improve our process in these ways? So the next time I'm not getting hit or hey, if it's really bad, the last 10 projects have really ended in kind of chaos for me. Is there any way we can work together to prevent that from happening? I mean, we all have the same.

• 28:54Scott Tolinski?

  You know, whether it's management or you, you all have the same goals to get this done smoothly. And if it's not smooth, like that's usually a fault of management, but you can help them with that by clearly communicating what you need. Here's what I need and can you help me with that?

• 29:12Wes Bos?

  I think as this maybe is a good thing with all this AI stuff right now where the dev is moving a little bit more up the chain into the planning stages and of the project. And and maybe the design is happening in in parallel. And that that moves things along a bit quicker because it previously used to be like you have a project manager and they figure out what they want. And then you just waterfall it all the way down. And at the end of the day, the poor developer gets crunched, right? And like, I feel like the developer is is involved much earlier on these days. And in fact, may even be the person that's figuring it out at the in the first place.

• 29:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. And along with that, I think you can also set yourself up for success a little bit more to have time-saving tricks here and there. Like starter kits or or various like, you know, decisions that you make that are automatic that like can lead to better results. If you're you're moving faster. Granted, these are all things that vary greatly from team to team, work job to job. So like, this is not blanket advice for everybody, but I think the number one piece of advice in in this regard is that communicate clearly what you need. Because people just don't know, you can assume that people know what you need or don't need or think about or whatever. Or you could assume that your boss isn't going to listen to you anyways.

• 30:38Scott Tolinski?

  But I think it's important to be very clear with what you need. There's also the a situation of pure failure. So you have a deadline. That deadline is very obviously going to come and go. And there is zero percent chance you're going to hit it, right? I I think there's times when you can crunch it and you can get it done. And there's not, I don't can't think of any instances in my career specifically where I haven't been able to deliver. But I know that things get delayed all the time. So there are those situations where it's just straight up not possible.

• 31:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Scott Tolinski?

  So what can you do? Communicate earlier is better, right? If it's the day it's due and you're saying it's not done, man, this is not, that's not going to work for anybody. But if you can let people know a week ahead of time, a month ahead of time, two months, whatever, like this is going to be really tight. I'm going to crunch it. Here's my progress. Here's what's going to happen. It's going to be tight. Then they can at least start preparing themselves mentally to make those decisions, but also preparing, you know, the client or the team or whoever is next in the line to be able to be prepared for that type of situation. But again, communicating early and often is the best practice here.

• 31:55Wes Bos?

  Course correction, as the we like to say in the biz, you know, just it's not like a total failure, but it's just like you're just constantly being correcting to figure out how you can hit the deadline. And it shouldn't happen where you're so far in at a easy, we're not going to make this, you know? You should have figured that out way sooner.

• 32:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes. All that, all of the above there. And then hopefully, again, if you have done the planning ahead of time, it should be a lot more obvious to you when it's not going to be possible. Because sometimes people don't realize it until it's too late. Like, I'm just going to get it. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. Oh, crap, it's not going to be fine. Like, that, that could be a major situation. So yeah, just having a good handle on all that stuff is very important. I don't have anything else here, Wes. Do you have anything that we didn't get to?

• 32:46Wes Bos?

  Nope. Thank you so much. I just looked it up. The person who submitted this question was anonymous. So please submit your questions, syntax.fm/potluck. Thank you to Sentry. Check them out, sentry.io/synthesis. Use the coupon code TASTYTREAT. And that gets you two months free. But that's all we got. Peace.

• 33:07Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.