Clarity before commitment. This piece reflects how we think about structure, urgency, and sustainable execution when designing and reviewing automation systems.
Published December 12, 2025
Written by David Kershaw, Founder of Tekmera
Deadlines have always been part of my work. They show up early, they show up late, and they often arrive before there is a clear picture of what the work actually involves. Over time, I started noticing that my reaction to deadlines was shaping my experience of the work more than the deadlines themselves.
I tend to take deadlines seriously. I internalize them quickly. Once a date exists, it becomes something I orient around, even when the surrounding context is incomplete. That habit created a familiar kind of pressure, one that did not come from the difficulty of the work, but from trying to reconcile a fixed date with an evolving understanding of what needed to be done.
Deadlines, clarity, and where pressure accumulates
I do think deadlines matter. When they are grounded in a real understanding of the work, they provide structure. They help frame effort, create coordination points, and give projects boundaries. They can be useful when there is shared clarity around scope, dependencies, and constraints.
What I encountered more often were deadlines introduced before that clarity existed. Dates would appear while the work was still being defined. Decisions were unresolved. Dependencies were not mapped. Unknowns were treated as if they were settled. The deadline existed independently of the structure needed to support it.
Those dates were often introduced as aspirational markers. They helped planning conversations move forward and gave discussions a sense of direction. At that stage, they felt lightweight and flexible.
Once the work moved into execution, that same date carried a different weight. The people implementing the work absorbed the urgency more directly. For them, the deadline shaped daily decisions, tradeoffs, and cognitive load.
What stood out over time was that the people most affected by deadline pressure were often the ones who already carried a strong sense of responsibility. They did not need a date to care. They were already engaged early, thinking ahead and accounting for risk before it was visible.
Different relationships to urgency
I have spoken with many people who say they need deadlines in order to act. Without a final date, they struggle to create momentum. For them, deadlines serve as an external source of urgency. They help initiate motion.
My relationship to urgency is different. I tend to generate it internally. I feel responsibility early, sometimes before there is enough information to justify it. When a deadline is introduced on top of that, it does not create focus. It amplifies pressure.
The same mechanism lands differently depending on who receives it. What helps one person begin can overload another person who is already fully engaged. The urgency is shared unevenly.
What happens when deadlines pass
Over time, I started paying attention to what actually happened when deadlines were missed. In most cases, the consequences were limited. Work continued. Priorities shifted. The date faded, and the conversation moved on.
I have seen projects where a date arrived with urgency attached, even though nothing material depended on it. Extra hours were spent to meet it. The work shipped. The discussion moved forward. Only later did it become clear that the date had never been tied to an external dependency or decision. It had simply felt important at the time.
The urgency lived mostly in the buildup. Once the date passed, it rarely matched the intensity that preceded it. Seeing that pattern made it harder to justify treating every deadline as an emergency, especially when it was not grounded in a clear plan.
Value over compression
What consistently reduced pressure was not working faster. It was making progress visible earlier.
When value was delivered incrementally, urgency did not accumulate. It released. Each concrete outcome created space for conversation, adjustment, and recalibration. The deadline became one reference point among many.
When value was deferred and bundled, pressure concentrated at the end. The deadline carried the emotional weight of everything that had not yet been surfaced.
Constraints and consent
I started asking myself a small set of questions on a regular basis.
- What am I saying yes to that violates my real constraints?
- Is this deadline actually mine to own?
- If I am agreeing to this date, what am I truly committing to?
Often, the pressure I felt came from silent agreement. I had not explicitly accepted the deadline, but I had allowed it to shape my behavior anyway.
My real constraints are time, energy, and cognitive capacity. Dates that ignore those constraints do not become real simply because they are stated.
Saying no without making it personal
Saying no is still a skill I am actively working on.
There was a project where I effectively assigned myself daily deadlines based on completion. The structure was highly waterfall. Most of the uncertainty lived upstream, and I was operating at the end of the chain. As the schedule compressed, that compression landed almost entirely on me.
I treated those deadlines as strict. I reorganized my days around them. I absorbed the pressure as if failing to meet them would materially damage the outcome. Over time, that pressure accumulated into burnout, and I eventually left the project.
What became clear only in retrospect was that the deadlines were not strict at all. After I left, the project continued for another four months. The work progressed. The outcome was well received. The stakeholders were satisfied.
My burnout, and my exit, turned out to be unnecessary.
That experience forced a re evaluation. I had mistaken urgency for truth. I had responded to compression by creating more compression, instead of creating space. If I had surfaced the structural issues earlier, slowed the pace of commitment, and treated the dates as negotiable inputs rather than fixed constraints, I would have been healthier and the project would not have suffered. I likely would have delivered more value, not less.
That was the moment I understood that silently absorbing deadlines was not professionalism. It was a failure to make reality visible.
Simply refusing a deadline is often interpreted as unwillingness or a lack of effort. I have learned that the only way to avoid that misinterpretation is to ground the conversation in structure rather than assertion.
Instead of arguing preference or intent, I bring the shape of the work into view. What needs to happen. What depends on what. What decisions are still open. What assumptions remain unproven. When the structure is visible, the conversation shifts away from effort and toward feasibility.
There are still moments when the structure is clear and the date remains unchanged. In those cases, the clarity does not eliminate the constraint, but it does change my relationship to it. I am no longer carrying an unspoken promise. I am making a conscious tradeoff.
That shift externalizes reality instead of internalizing pressure. It keeps the focus on the work rather than the person.
What changed
I did not stop caring about deadlines. I stopped absorbing them by default.
When a date is grounded in reality, I can commit to it fully. When it is not, the most responsible thing I can do is surface that early and clearly. That approach has led to better conversations, fewer last minute crises, and a more sustainable relationship with the work.
The panic faded once I stopped treating every deadline as a personal obligation and started treating it as a claim that needed to be supported by structure.
Are deadlines standing in for clarity in your automation work?