There is nothing better at ruining a perfectly good weekend than an impending deadline. It nags at you when wash the dishes, it plagues you when you mow the lawn, and it pesters you when you go to bed.
How do you ease this burden, when you have a deadline coming up fast?
1. Ask for an extension
If you really are worried that you are not going to meet a deadline, then it is much better to manage expectations than miss the target. If you have good reason, and can present your argument well, this is often the best approach. However, do not use this just because you want to put off the inevitable – you will loose trust, and never get the work done (especially if you are someone who needs the pressure of a deadline!).
2. Reduce the scope
The next step, if you are struggling to negotiate the amount of time up, is to try and negotiate the work load down. It is some times helpful to call this ‘clarifying the scope‘ rather than ‘reducing what I have to do’! This might take the form of presenting a first draft rather than a final version, or the meat of the work without the ancillaries or appendices.
3. Get some help
The quickest way to half the time need to do something? Double the number of people working on it! Get a colleague, a friend, or even a boss to role their sleeves up – if you make people aware you need help, they will often do all they can.
4. Break it down into chunks
When you look at all you have to do, and how little time you have to do it, it can be overwhelming. Split the whole into parts, the parts into bits, and the bits into morsels. These are things you can see yourself doing easily and quickly, and help you manage your progress.
5. Write a timetable
Once you have broken the project into bits, you can now allocate these to particular time-slots. If you know you only have 10 minutes to write each slide for a presentation, you are less likely to spend two hours on each one getting the ‘right shade of green’.
6. Prioritize
One of the core principles of productivity is the Pareto 80/20 rule. If you can rank everything you need to do, and then get through the top 20% of it, then you will be a good deal through the job.
7. Use templates
The set-up of any project or task is always the most time consuming element – not necessarily in terms of productive time, but it requires more trial and error. Are there any templates you can start from? Is there a presentation you have already done with your company’s logo on? Can you download a beginners guide to wallpapering so you don’t have to start from nothing?
8. And finally…
If all else fails, just throw yourself headlong into it and see what happens. There is always the chance that it was easier than you thought, expectations were lower than you thought, or your paranoia was greater than you thought!
Good luck!
