Coming from a journalism background as a daily newspaper reporter, I live by deadlines. They are trickier when you are dealing with outside sources, but you have to stick to them. Many times employees/contractors just need a little extra incentives to put the effort into meeting deadlines....or you can call it bribery. The last big project I worked on wasn't going to get done by the deadline. It was "impossible." Then we told them we'd take the whole staff to Internext if they got it done....and it was done.

When I had a large sales staff, normal hours were 9-6. Anyone who came in at 7 a.m. got free breakfast and anyone still there at 8 p.m. got free dinner, catered. It worked very well.