How people relate with us and judge us often comes down to one concept: are we able to meet the expectations they have?

Our customers or bosses determine what work they’ll trust us with based on how well we meet their expectations. Even friends decide if they want to invest in a relationship with us based on expectation and fulfillment. For example, if you’re meeting someone for the first time and arrive 30 minutes late without notice, the person you meet is unlikely to want to grow the relationship. Alternatively, if you promise a customer that you’ll finish a project in three weeks but finish on budget within a week, they are likely to return. Whether it’s a friend or colleague, everyone around us creates opinions of us based on whether we are reliable or interesting as they expected us to be.

It might sound simple but meeting expectations on time, every time, has become one of the most difficult skills to master. That’s because we have dozens of expectations – and often, we don’t even know what they are.

But how can we learn to master expectations? To mater expectations, understand them. Expectations can be defined as ‘a collection of beliefs about what the future holds’. They come in three forms:

1. Relationships. Someone expects something of you as a friend, neighbor, or a relative. For example, if you are taking care of a friend’s dog, you are expected to feed the dog.

2. Business. A customer or boss expects you to accomplish something by a specific time, or at a specific level of quality. For example, you must meet a sales quota by the end of the quarter to satisfy your boss’s expectations.

3. Your own mind. You expect something of yourself by a specific time. For example, you expect yourself to be financially independent by age 30.

Expectations also come in various levels of formality. At the lowest level, there are expectations built into any relationship. Society defines what it means to be a friend, a sibling, or a lover, and to reject these norms often means fighting an uphill battle.

At the next level, there are informal (often verbal) commitments that you make to friends and colleagues. At the highest level, there are formal expectations put in writing with customers and creditors.

To get better at understanding expectations, we must catalog our expectations regularly. Many people catalog their expectations in lists, but miss critical items. Here are three ways to capture expectations completely:

1. Catalog throughout the day. Carry a paper with you and write down everything that is expected of you as you pass through the day. Making a habit of writing down expectations in context will make you less likely to miss something.

2. Mind map using a whiteboard. Adding a structure or a pattern to the way you produce ideas can significantly improve thinking. A whiteboard is an effective visual tool for drawing expectations. Start with a center circle that says me and branch out with family, friends, investments, health and learning. Then, in each branching idea, you can start to write specific expectations in that context.


3. Contact people who have expectations. Inherent in every expectation is a person who is expecting something to happen. Make a list of the most important people in your life and call them regularly to discuss expectations.

Once cataloged, meeting expectations is a process that can be improved. Here are some ways to improve:

1. Understand each expectation. The first step to meeting an expectation is understanding that expectation. Communicate with the person who has the expectation until you have a level of clarity and can write it down. Having a written expectation will enable you to focus your efforts and outsource some of the work.

2. Organize your time. The most common reasons for missing expectations is lack of time. The best way to maximize time is organizing it. Time can be organized linearly and in blocks. First, organize linearly, using the start and end dates to create a timeline of what needs to get done. Second, block out specific sections of the day to accomplish specific tasks. Treat the blocks as scheduled meetings and don’t allow interruptions.

3. Ask for help early. Two common mistakes are being afraid to ask for help or using Google as a cure-for-all. The best path to answer a question is to ask someone who has done it before. They will be able to explain things better and faster than Google searches. Also, you should ask for help as soon as possible. Although you could find a solution yourself, it is faster to ask someone else.

4. Get the right team in place. Having the wrong team or wrong person on a team is like having a disease. They infect others and make it difficult to get anything done. It is critical to hire slowly and fire quickly. Too many people hold on to bad teams or don’t spend enough time getting people on board. It is better to not have enough excellent people than too much terrible people.

5. Spend resources wisely. It is tempting to use money and resources quickly when they are available. Instead, think of every resources as a meal you have left on a deserted island. You will eventually run out if you don’t use it wisely before escaping or producing more food.

Putting this steps together will help you meet expectations on time, every time.