“I don’t need time,” Duke Ellington liked to say. “What I need is a deadline!” His biographer Terry Teachout gives the line in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.
Teachout calls Ellington “the most chronic of procrastinators.” In Teachout’s book, the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon “was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere.”
In June 2024 Apple showed a more personal version of Siri at its developer event. Ads for the iPhone 16, launched that September, promoted the new features. In March 2025 Apple said: “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features.” It pulled an ad starring the actor Bella Ramsey.
Buyers sued for false advertising. One suit said the phones offered “a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence.” Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action over the delayed features, pending court approval. Apple maintains that it did nothing wrong.
“How does a project get to be a year late?. . . . One day at a time.” This question and answer begin the text of a chapter in Fred Brooks’s book The Mythical Man-Month. Usually, he writes, “the disaster is due to termites, not tornadoes.”
Brooks based the book on his experience managing the development of OS/360, an operating system at IBM. It was first published in 1975. Its best-known rule is also about lateness: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
In 1943 the War Department gave Lockheed 150 days to design and build a jet fighter. Chief engineer Kelly Johnson’s team delivered the XP-80 prototype in 143 days. Lockheed Martin still tells the story as “seven days ahead of schedule.” The XP-80 first flew on January 8, 1944.
Johnson’s team became known as the Skunk Works. Later, Johnson won the contract for the U-2 spy plane “by promising to deliver the aircraft in just eight months.”
In November 2020 the Federal Railroad Administration set a minimum standard for Amtrak trains. The standard is 80 percent on time “for any two consecutive calendar quarters.”
When a train gets fewer than 80 percent of its passengers there on time for two quarters in a row, a complaint can go to the Surface Transportation Board. In July 2023, after a complaint from Amtrak, the Board opened an investigation into the Sunset Limited. This is Amtrak’s train between New Orleans and Los Angeles.
The Board first decides whether the delays came from a railroad that failed to give Amtrak priority over freight, as the law requires. A second phase can then look at possible damages.
Federal agencies grade contractors during and at the end of most larger contracts. The rules list the factors. One is “Technical (quality of product or service).” Another is “Schedule/timeliness,” graded on its own. Each factor gets one of five ratings, from “exceptional” to “unsatisfactory.”
The grades go into a government system called CPARS. Agencies must use them when they choose contractors for new work. A grade counts for three years after the work ends. On construction and architect-engineer contracts, it counts for six years.
In 1982 Congress passed the Prompt Payment Act. In most cases, a federal agency that pays a contractor late must pay interest. Under the 1982 act, a bill was due 30 days after the agency received a proper invoice, unless the contract set a date. The act also gave agencies a grace period. For most bills, no interest was due if the agency paid within 15 days after the due date.
The 1982 act said the interest must come out of the agency’s own funds for the program, not from new money. Today the contractor does not have to ask. The payment office adds the interest “automatically, without request from the contractor.” For the first half of 2026, the rate was 4 1/8 percent a year.
A standard clause used in many U.S. federal construction contracts has a blank for a dollar amount. If the contractor “fails to complete the work within the time specified in the contract,” it pays that amount “for each calendar day of delay until the work is completed or accepted.” The price of each late day is set before the work begins.
The Federal Acquisition Regulation says to use such liquidated damages when “the time of delivery or timely performance is so important” that the government can expect harm from a delay. The daily rate should include what it costs the government to keep inspecting and supervising the site.
The rule says these damages “are not punitive.” The rate must be “a reasonable forecast of just compensation for the harm that is caused by late delivery.”
The software company 37signals, maker of Basecamp, publishes its working method as a book, Shape Up, by Ryan Singer, free to read online. Its rule is “fixed time, variable scope.” Teams work in six-week cycles, and a project gets at most six weeks. “Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and short enough to feel the deadline from the beginning.”
When the work does not fit, the team cuts scope, not time. “Shipping on time means shipping something imperfect.” A project that does not ship in the time set for it “doesn’t get an extension” by default.
Six Companies, the contractor for Boulder Dam, now Hoover Dam, had seven years from April 20, 1931, to finish the work.
At the dedication on September 30, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised “the energy, resourcefulness and zeal of the builders, who, under the greatest physical obstacles, have pushed this work forward to completion two years in advance of the contract requirements.”