The Done Manifesto

Do you ever have trouble working on tight deadlines? Everyone deals with deadline pressure differently. A sense of urgency can be a double-edged sword — the deadline crunch can inspire you to new heights of productivity or wear you down mentally.

Bloggers Bre Pettis, co-founder of a robotics company, and Kio Stark developed the Done Manifesto to set guidelines for working on deadline. Naturally, they developed the rules on a 20-minute deadline. Here are the 13 guidelines of the Done Manifesto:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Note that this advice doesn’t apply to a lot of tasks CPAs must do. If you’re doing a tax return or an audit, it doesn’t make sense to “laugh at perfection” or to count failure as done. It doesn’t do much good to finish a project in a haphazard way to get it off your plate for the time being — that strategy will come back to haunt you. But if you’re struggling with procrastination on projects outside of your comfort zone, the Done Manifesto can get you back in the working groove.