This week I was trying to finalise a decision on a project and was working in partnership with an external company.<\/p>\n
To do this, I needed sign-off from a senior colleague (in an organisational sense, he\u2019s not that old!) on whether the project should go ahead or not.<\/p>\n
His first response to my email was – not unreasonably – \u2018when is the deadline to make a decision?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Having been given a pretty loose deadline by our external partners, I responded by stating the importance of making a decision quickly and requested a response \u2018ASAP\u2019.<\/p>\n I waited 24hours before seeing if he had made his decision.<\/p>\n This is where I learned this valuable lesson.<\/p>\n He said that he does not respond to any request that has a deadline of \u2018ASAP\u2019<\/p>\n Now\u2026 you may think this is the behaviour of a diva.<\/p>\n Someone who doesn\u2019t respond to being asked to make a decision quickly.<\/p>\n You would be wrong.<\/p>\n He went on to explain that in an environment when we are all up against it, using the term ASAP or \u2018as soon as possible\u2019 doesn\u2019t mean today.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t mean tomorrow. It means after the list of all of the finite and specific deadlines of things on his to-do-list.<\/p>\n It was something that I\u2019d never thought about before.<\/p>\n ASAP may sound like an important statement.<\/p>\n It is, in fact, pointless. Mainly because it is relative. The deadline is set by the recipient, not the person making the request.<\/p>\n That means it\u2019s a request I for one will not use again. \u00a0I may even choose to ignore \u2018ASAP\u2019 requests myself.<\/p>\n But what about my project deadline?<\/p>\n By giving a fixed (and very short) deadline to my colleague, I got a swift and timely response and we moved on.<\/p>\n I have been working in my field for over 15 years, but I\u2019ve learned you\u2019re never too experienced to unlearn something you\u2019ve been doing for years.<\/p>\n Especially when it comes to the expectations of other people.<\/p>\n If it took me 15 years to realise that ASAP was a useless expression, there are probably many of us still using it. Some with success, some not.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s why I wanted to share my experience\u2026 ASAP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week I was trying to finalise a decision on a project and was working in partnership with an external company. To do this, I needed sign-off from a senior colleague (in an organisational sense, he\u2019s not that old!) on whether the project should go ahead or not. His first response to my email was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[496],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-views"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phdmedia.com\/united-kingdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}