Empower Your Deadline Management Skills With 11 Steps
All managers know about the high importance of deadlines in their work. Deadlines help to achieve both large and small objectives. They affect productivity and motivate teams.
Strategic deadlines are aimed to lead you to your desired goals every day, week or month.
Missing deadlines on a regular basis may lead to negative consequences. It may impact employees, the whole team or even the company.
How to empower your deadline management skills and get all things done?
There are some easy steps to improve deadline driven management. Here’s their short description:
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Master your to-do list
No doubt that a to-list is the first key to your successful time management. List down all specific tasks that you want to do. This will give you a big picture overview of your workload. In your to-do list, mention all short-term and long-term activities that you need to complete.
The next advanced level is to apply a powerful roadmap that you may find in any modern product management tool. This is a high-level perspective of what will happen over time and what you’ve planned.
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Break down tasks
Take a big project and break it down into smaller tasks. It is a good idea to take the time frame you decided on and break it down into one-month units, then one-week units.
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Prioritize
Prioritizing your tasks will help you to properly manage your time. Prioritizing assists you to see the highest to the lowest priority tasks.
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Identify long-term priorities
Priorities with the long term have a longer time period, usually, more than 1 year to complete. You deal with long-term priorities when, for example, are planning a conference or any important event.
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Estimate time/effort
Estimating the time and effort for completing a task helps to organize priorities and enables you to have a realistic plan. Rely on your best estimate and inquire from others who have done it.
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Work on deadlines optimization
When deadlines are met, it helps to track and measure progress and accomplishments and you have no pressure. Apply a convenient roadmap and visualize all the steps needed to reach the end goal.
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Manage interruptions
Too many interruptions can damage your productivity and steal valuable time (your endless calls, emails, messages, chatting, etc.)
Try to come up with solutions to keep the interruptions under control.
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Meetings are crucial but…
Reduce the number of meetings and organize only the most necessary of them.
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Provide updates
Regular providing status updates for your top management or team members. Reporting of status updates are also important.
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Avoid routine
Handling routine or repetitive stuff is about mapping out all the steps required to complete an activity. Capture them with the standard operating procedures and with checklists.
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Get ready to change
Changes may happen anytime, they can have the potential of throwing your well-prepared plans into disarray. It definitely heightens pressure to perform to meet tight deadlines.
Try to be flexible and adaptable and aim to change gears as smoothly as possible.