Deadlines

self motivation (inner control)

Of course; Reward. Rewards are a much better incentive than fear-of-punishment for conditioning behaviour.

 This might be useful.

It turns out there's an innate fundamental asymmetry in how humans judge gain vs. loss (risk aversion and reflection effect are key concepts you might want to look into if you're interested in this sort of thing),  though the same holds true for animals; a reinforcement system is far superior to a penal system in conditioning desired behaviour.

Strictly speaking a deadline is not an incentive at all. It's a threat of punishment if the goods aren't delivered on time. An incentive is something that makes you want to finish on time... i.e. something good.

I agree with the other comments that positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement (i.e. punishment).

Why not offer a bonus for finishing ahead of the deadline? You might find that more effective.

Deadlines are a way to get people to finish what they're committed to. People (at least the procrastinators in us) have a tendency to delay or to meander away from what they should be focused on and a looming deadline causes them to refocus.

As others mentioned, it's not really an incentive.

I've been experimenting with Scrum (an agile methodology that should work for non-software projects as well). There are a number of components that replace / augment deadlines:

- Break down the work into 1 and 2-day increments (so it's simpler to judge progress and know what's expected of you). This is still a deadline, albeit a shorter one.

- Report status daily to the team. If this is a team effort, the psychological effect makes you focus on what you're doing so as not to let the team down. Note that in scrum, teams sign up for shared goals.

- Iterations are 30 days long. That's another deadline, though the fact that it comes every 30 days and all the work needs to be completed by then has a strong effect on the team.

usually you do not look for an alternative to deadlines- your'e main goal, in every industry is "getting things done" - and you definitely want to add "on time, on budget..." and ct.

what's usually done is that you add some more variables to the equation, depends on your area of work:

software quality metrics - if people are delivering on time (deadline), but with poor results that need rework / recode - your'e in trouble

knowledge sharing - if you have a knowledge management system / platform , you might want to reward those who answer people in forums, adds new articles / ideas..

you might want to try metrics of team work - if you measure your team/s together, you incourage teamwork

you might try to measure initiatives in your orgainzation - quantity and quality. ideas that people raise and can improve your work / workplace.

those are some metrics that you should consider. if you work in software try loking for IT Governance, if you work in IT Service - try ITIL.           good luck.

The main negative factor in meeting deadlines is procrastination because a task may seem easier to complete than it actually is and therefore it is tackled late and progresses slowly at first. Therefore, deadlines should be part of an overall schedule that is intelligently drawn up with milestones. There should be some type of reward as each milestone is met. Doing this with a good amount of self-discipline should enable anyone to complete the task without the threat of deadlines.