Schedule Pre-Work Time
Putting deadlines on calendars is all well and good, but it is only the first step to staying on schedule.
Sometimes I note upcoming deadlines in my calendar, to make sure I meet them; that’s how amazing I am!
An article deadline was approaching, and I dutifully put the deadline on my calendar. That way, it wouldn’t surprise me. It was visible days beforehand. I had every intention of working on it well before the due date. Every intention. Every. Single. Intention.
Then I waited until the night before it was due to start. This wasn’t procrastination, of course. I was simply putting off the work so as not to intimidate anyone with my dazzling productivity. I sat down to work and … got distracted by some random emergency. Ultimately it became an all-nighter.
Putting deadlines on calendars is all well and good, but it is only the first step. Don’t assume you will magically find the time to get the work done. A couple of days before the deadline, schedule time to do the work. Of course, we both know you’ll be so productive that you will get it done before then. Then when you finish days early, you can free up the schedule time you reserved. But on the off chance that you procrastinate (so as not to intimidate your coworkers) you still have that time blocked out in your schedule to complete the work.
Check out more of Get-It-Done Guy’s tips on organization and time management.
Calendar image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
