Five Best Practices for Managing Deadlines

Management guru Peter Drucker said "you cannot build performance on weaknesses." That‘s why it is essential for you to hone your skills as a first step towards boosting your own productivity, as well the performance of those you manage or work with. How well you manage yourself is the keystone for accomplishing the outcomes that will make you successful, and a key to managing yourself is the positive, productive use of deadlines.

Keeping all this in mind, below are five best practices for managing deadlines that will make a difference in helping you manage your productivity:

1. Start your day as early as possible.

Getting up early, or at least earlier, than you usually do will be easier when you are doing it as part of a tactic to get more done in your work day. One reward is being able to focus on your agenda for the day before the rest of the family awakens. Another is getting more work done before noon than you have been used to doing. That puts the rest of the day in a different, more positive perspective. The charge you get from that kind of satisfaction will earn a pay-off that is more than worthwhile.

2. Build momentum to get up to speed.

Just as an airplane has to increase its speed to create enough lift, you need to generate enough momentum to affect your motivation and productivity. An example is when people feel like they are "really on a roll." Their self-confidence is high, their attitude is positive, and their work product is increased. In almost all cases, their effectiveness is greater. A useful tactic for building momentum is to work on related issues instead of scattered topics that have little relation to each other. The next tactic reinforces this best practice.

3. Do things in three‘s.

First, notice that this best practice uses an action verb. "Do" means just what it says. A strategy without tactics never won a high school debate, a city council race, or a military battle. It's how the tactics within the strategy were carried out that made the difference in the real world. Second, don‘t confuse this with multi-tasking. Think of it as "killing 3 birds with one stone." Working on tasks that are related by similar issues and goals helps your brain focus better. Even searching for commonalities among your projects will give you a perspective that you otherwise would not have. In those circumstances, your product will benefit by your increased intentionality, and each of the three elements will profit from the inter-related efforts.

4. Remember that work expands, or contracts, to fill the allotted time.

Have you ever noticed that if you allow yourself two hours to get a one-hour job done that, nine times out of ten, it takes you two hours to do it? Also, if you give yourself 45 minutes to do a one-hour job, you usually get it done in 45 minutes? Try this: within reason, shorten the time you give yourself and others to complete tasks and see what happens. Usually, the other person will tell you if the reduced timeline is unreasonable, but you‘ll be surprised at how often the work will be completed in less time than it used to take.

5. Avoid the eleventh-hour fire drill.

Many people find themselves up against an 11th hour un-planned deadline because they have not used internal deadlines positively along the way. They think they will work better "under the gun" of an arbitrary deadline. Ironically, a "deadline" once meant a line drawn on a military prison floor, and if the prisoners crossed it, they were shot. A deadline that you didn‘t anticipate may feel like a "life or death" situation, but no one in his/her right mind would recommend drastic desperation as a best practice for self-management.

In order to avoid this last-minute scramble, try a method called scheduling in reverse." The key idea here is to start with where you want to end up and move backwards.

Begin by analyzing the work so you know how much time each step or activity will require, and schedule each step or phase in reverse order so you know the latest feasible starting date you can safely use to meet your deadline. Use your experience and judgment to divide the task into short, manageable steps, each with its own deadline. Next, start on the beginning deadline date and allow time for each step, calculating backward. This calculation also gives you the target starting and ending dates for each step of the project.

Management, especially self-management, is not a spectator sport. You must work hard on the practice field day after day so that effective training exercises---best practices--- become productive habits. If you just read the "best practices" and don‘t practice them, all you will improve is your reading skills, and maybe your vocabulary.

When you do these best practices regularly, they will help you get more done in less time and with less stress, which is an excellent definition of winning.