5 tips for meeting deadlines without feeling overwhelmed

• How to meet your work deadlines
• What to do if you miss a deadline

When setting, or being informed of, your timeframes, you might want to set yourself a soft deadline that falls a little ahead of the hard one. The size of this buffer will depend on the scale of the project itself, but the idea is that, by setting yourself this earlier deadline, you’ll ensure that you have some time set aside if things go wrong.

However, if you’re going to use this approach, it’s important not to go too far and set an earlier soft deadline that stresses you out by putting extra pressure on you.

This is important for any project, but particularly those which will be going on for an extended period of time. There are a number of reasons why setting milestones along the way are important:

• So you can work on achievable goals: the project itself may seem quite overwhelming when looked at in its entirety, but, when broken into chunks, your team may find it more straightforward to navigate.
• To see how you’re tracking: if you just set yourself a single, end-of-project deadline, you might think you’re perfectly on schedule, only to find out too late that you’re behind where you need to be. By setting a series of milestones along the way, you can keep a closer eye on your overall progress, and get back into gear if things are moving too slowly.
• To provide a point of communication: if you’re working with others, mini milestones can provide an opportunity to reconvene with the colleagues you’re working with to check that everyone is happy and knows what needs to happen next. However, remember that this communication doesn’t necessarily need to be a meeting, an email or IM can serve the same purpose for project catch-ups.

When you’re working under pressure, it can be tempting to jump straight in and start putting pen to paper so that you have a feeling that something is getting done. However, the headless chicken approach is more than likely going to come back to bite you, particularly if you’re working on a complicated project with lots of moving parts. 

It is, therefore, important that you sit back and take a bird’s eye view at the very start to assess the order in which things need to be completed so that you have an efficient workflow throughout.  For example, it might be that one element of the project can’t be completed until you have the results of another, and you may find yourself encountering problems that could have been easily avoided with a bit of careful planning.

We’re all used to using Google Calendar to arrange meetings with other people, but you can also use it to make clear that you’re busy working on something and don’t want be disturbed.

Simply use the shared calendar that your colleagues can see, and block out the amount of time that you want to, and label it something like “Working - not available for meetings”. This will make sure that your colleagues know that, during these times, you will have your head down working on the project, and that they should book you for meetings at other times.

It will also help you to stay to task yourself, because you know that there’s nothing that will disrupt your flow, and that there’s nothing else you should be doing.

Sometimes, a deadline will be handed down to you from on high, with no opportunity for you to provide input on how achievable you think it is. However, it’s increasingly common for senior managers to take a more consultative approach, whereby they devise project deadlines in combination with those who will be responsible for delivering the work. If you get this opportunity, here are some tips for setting achievable deadlines:

• Break the project into smaller subgoals: rather than looking at the piece of work in its entirety, break it down into bite size chunks. By analysing every step that will need to be completed, you can get a better idea of how long each of these components will take, and thus when to set your overall deadline.
• Talk to your team: if you’ll have a bunch of people working under you on delivering this project, get their thoughts on how long their respective contributions should take them. This is particularly important if this is a piece of work that will involve the input of multiple specialists, as these people will be able to provide a much more accurate estimate of how long they’ll need.
• Build in some buffer: it’s important to think realistically about what could go wrong, or what could hold you up, and build in some buffer accordingly when creating your deadline. One way of doing this is to set yourself a soft deadline, slightly ahead of the actual final thing, and aim for this as a best case scenario.
• Consider your other priorities: it’s vital you don’t get too tunnel-visioned when creating the deadline for one project. If you, or others, have other competing priorities, these need to be factored in.

Holding your hands up and saying that you didn’t achieve your goal can be hard, but it’s important that you apologise for the delay. As well as being courteous, apologising when you break the news to your manager can drastically improve their reaction, because it shows awareness on your part that this mistake has impacted the business.

Apologising also shows them that you care. If you were to make a habit of missing deadlines, it might be interpreted as a slack attitude towards your workload. Saying that you’re sorry can help to allay these concerns and demonstrate you’re still the team player you always have been.

Crucially, here we’re talking about explanations, not excuses. While legitimate reasons, such as illness should be mentioned if they contributed to you missing the deadline, it’s a very bad idea to try and invent spurious reasons for missing the deadline which won’t hold water if they’re questioned. Even worse is blaming someone else for what’s happened. If you were the one in charge of delivering the project on time, the buck stops with you if that doesn’t materialise.

Not only does offering an explanation help your manager understand what happened, it shows them that you do as well. While missing a deadline is far from ideal, it does provide a useful opportunity to learn from what went wrong, and ensure you don’t make the same mistakes next time.