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I'm translating a document from a business meeting into English .

Participants are often being implored to finish their tasks by November, as planned, and in no way to December.

I'll give some more background to focus my question a bit: this is a company project, and the management has set deadlines that all of the participants are supposed to meet. There may be all kinds of reasons that might prevent them from finishing their tasks by those deadlines, but the management is emphasizing that December would be catastrophic, and is imploring them to do whatever they can so as not to get into that situation.

I need a word or phrase to replace "going past a deadline".

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  • Delay, postpone, procrastinate, move, let them sit idle, put on hold, sit on their hands, chicken out... It depends entirely on what it is they are not supposed to be doing.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Oct 23, 2014 at 12:36
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    Leave.........?
    – WS2
    Commented Oct 23, 2014 at 12:36
  • And there's nothing wrong with your very own two suggestions, either. This is really quite broad. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Oct 23, 2014 at 12:38
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    This is a fine Q all right. The use-case sentence mat need to be rephrased for the purpose of this Q, though. Anyway, the relevent noun is slip. When the deadline is crossed, there's a "slip." In this case, however, one could also say "spillover into December."
    – Kris
    Commented Oct 23, 2014 at 13:50
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    Maybe "overshoot"?
    – Dan
    Commented Oct 23, 2014 at 21:47

8 Answers 8

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The word you are looking for is miss. "miss the deadline"

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This is how I would put it:

Participants are often being implored to finish their tasks by the end of November, as planned, and under no circumstances to let them drag on into December.

To underscore the urgency of timely completion of the task, I might also send reminder messages to each participant, specifying a "drop-dead due date" for each task:

The drop-dead due date for completion of your task is November 28. Please note that the task must be finished by that date; the intricacies of the project do not permit any extensions beyond November 28.

Of course, if you say that, you really shouldn't allow any extensions beyond the drop-dead date.

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  • +1 very appropriate answer! Especially the last comment :-)
    – EleventhDoctor
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 22:21
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A common phrase in contractual documents is that:
The project must not overrun into December.

This is more formal that phrases like drag on and more temporally based than words like exceed.

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One possibility is a metaphorical word that is common, and conveys the the pain of doing so, and that would be the word "bleed".

Participants are often being implored to finish their tasks by November, as planned, and in no way bleed into December.

Note you would use "into" rather than "to" here.

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Extending, stretching, continuing, overlapping...there are a few synonyms you could use, and it sounds as though they really want to get their point across that December is absolutely unacceptable. Find the strongest and use it.

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Participants are often being implored to finish their tasks by November, as planned, and in no way ____ to December.

"carry on into", or "continue into"

But you have a few other problems with this sentence: "as planned" should not have a comma before, "in no way..." has a non-parallel structure, and the passive "are being implored" is confusing.

Perhaps something like "Management implores the participants to finish their tasks by the end of November as planned, and in no way to allow the work to continue into December."

"Implore" wouldn't normally be used in business communication. And if management is saying that the work shall not continue into December, perhaps that could be said more directly: "Management expects the participants to finish their tasks by the end of November as planned, and will in no way tolerate unfinished work carrying on into December.

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I think 'extend' is the best word to use here, as it implies something that was of, or intended to be of, a given size/length/duration, but then made larger.

To "extend into December" would be to take the allotted time, and make it larger, which is not acceptable.

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The standard word here is "exceed".

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    .... to exceed to December? Doesn't sound right to me...
    – Ilanysong
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 6:17
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    @Ilanysong That's because you don't use it like that. To "exceed" a deadline is to "go past" a deadline. It's certainly not wrong but the sentence would have to change to use exceed. For example: "Participants are often being implored to finish their tasks by the end of November, as planned, and under no circumstances to let them exceed the deadline into December.
    – psosuna
    Commented Sep 5, 2017 at 19:58

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