Timeline and Deadline and Trade offs

Today one of my friend call me to discuss about mailing one post office in US. As we are students in US, we are not known of how mail system works here. Actually the story was she made a call to another friend of mine named Jay, to discuss the how to proceed with this.

When I received the call, I thought for a second that we are unknown of the process and will have to ask someone who has already completed it being in our shoes. So I thought of asking seniors as they might know, but Indians as they will be having same difficulties as us.

What could be the next thing to think about, may be how much time will it take and how important it is. So I thought for a second and tell her that I will be asking seniors tomorrow morning and we will be going at afternoon.

This seems very simple as I told if we know by tomorrow morning we go by afternoon. But what is time for the process to be completed? If it requires 2 hours then it is fine to go by afternoon but if it requires more than that, suppose a day then we should consider some other time. So here timeline refers to the time a particular task requires. The other scenario is how fast should we complete the task suppose if we complete it by next month will we benefit or shall we wait for 1 year or 1 week and what will be trade offs for both the situations? Here comes a concept called deadlines i.e. completing a given task with no trade offs or minimum trade offs.

You might be asking what is trade offs. In the above example it will be like whether the seniors I am going to ask aren’t busy with their work and told me to contact later or the people I am going with don’t have any other important plans at that allocated time or the post office through which we are mailing isn’t closed.