Working as a marketer, whether in-house or on the agency side, when colleagues or clients come to me with a request there is one thing that I ALWAYS insist on giving or getting before I start work – a due date.

As projects get more complex, you need more due dates. They’re never so simple that you don’t need at least one though.

Clearly communicated due dates do a lot for marketers. They help us manage time and priorities appropriately. They help us communicate with clients or stakeholders better. They allow us to manage expectations. They allow us to under promise and over deliver – to sound cliched.

Perhaps most importantly, they prevent micro-managing. Nobody likes to be micro-managed. Due dates let over-anxious managers know a time when they’re allowed to check-in. “We set a date of XX. If I don’t hear from him by then, I can follow up.”

From an internal perspective, in an AEC firm the clients are almost always senior, highly billable team members with a lot of balls in the air. The worst part…their deadlines are usually contingent on other people meeting milestones on time, which rarely seems to happen. So, if marketing can be the one area that establishes deadlines and always hits them, it makes life just a little easier.

I’ve worked with a lot of vendors and partners, and inevitably, the ones I continue to call on will provide me with schedules, or at least a date that I know I can see progress by. The ones that can’t commit to a date are the ones that scare me.