With offices closed in nations around the world, many of us are grappling with how to stay productive and on task as we work from home. To help provide insight on how to manage this, BBC Worklife is updating some of our most popular productivity stories from our archive. This story was originally published on 4 November 2019.



“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by,” the late British author Douglas Adams once famously quipped.

Most of us can empathise with this feeling of time rushing before our eyes as we struggle to complete a task. At least most of our delays are not the cause of national humiliation, but missed deadlines have led to red faces in politics on numerous occasions. Consider the Sydney Opera House. The Australian government first commissioned the project in 1958, with an expected completion date of 1963. Yet it didn’t open until 1973 – 10 years late – at enormous extra cost.

Today’s prominent examples include the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, Berlin’s Willy Brandt Airport, and Britain’s much-vaunted HS2 high-speed railway, which is now seven years behind target.