When it comes to agreed-upon deadlines, your manager doesn’t need you to be a hero or a self-sacrificing martyr. Consistently meeting deadlines without drama and fanfare will save you unnecessary stress in the long run.
Early in my career, I relied on my ability to perform well under pressure (at the last minute) to deal with anxiety-provoking deadlines. Even when the deliverable was strong, it was energetically costly to produce under those circumstances.
Much later, I discovered the joy of starting early, revising with plenty of time, and engineering accountability along the way. The upshot is a career hack: once you reliably tap into your brilliance on-demand and ahead of schedule, you can level up and become the owner of how a solution is delivered at scale, rather than the recipient of yet another task.
