Essential Tips for Meeting Deadlines

Meeting deadlines is important, whether its school, work, or any other venture you’re partaking in. You never want to be late on an assignment or a project, as it can cost you your grade or put your job in jeopardy. If you struggle at times with completing all your work by a deadline, you might want to consider incorporating some techniques to help yourself manage your workload in a timely manner.

Pacing yourself is key when you want to meet a deadline. Leaving tasks for the last minute can put a huge amount of burden and stress on yourself unnecessarily. From my experience, a great way to pace yourself is to create a schedule or calendar. You can set up mini-deadlines, where you write down that you want part of an assignment or project completed by a certain date or time. Once you’ve completed that part, you can check it off and move onto the next part. In this way, you can keep yourself motivated to complete the task. It also helps you alleviate pressure, as the assignment or project all of a sudden doesn’t appear overwhelming.

When you set aside time for the parts of your project, make sure the time you set aside is realistic. Setting aside a few minutes for something you know will take at least an hour is just setting yourself up for failure. When you plan ahead of time, keep this in mind, as having realistic, achievable goals are much more important for your mentality than outlandish ones.

You should prioritize the larger, more important tasks and try to complete them earlier. Doing so will leave you with the smaller, more trivial tasks closer to deadline, which won’t appear as much of a burden to you. It is always a relief mentally to know that the larger part of a project is out of the way. That being said, you shouldn’t take the smaller tasks for granted.

If you feel challenged, try to seek help from others. Sometimes, talking to others can give you the help or information you need to move forward with a task. It is something to consider if you ever find yourself sitting alone racking your brain.

Time management is a key skill to have if you want to get far in your career. Managing your time well and planning ahead of time can help you meet deadlines. For more help, you can read this article about how to meet deadlines effectively: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/meet-deadline.htm

You can also check out this video about hitting very tight deadlines:

--- BitterSweet Coaching Guest Writer