Time Management: 5 Reasons Why You Keep Missing Deadlines
… and how to stop!
If you’ve been missing a lot of deadlines recently, don’t panic, you’re not the only one. We’ve moved on from the early days of prison warfare; when a deadline was actually a line that was drawn around a prison to deter prisoners from crossing (because they’d be shot dead on sight!). Nowadays, you won’t get shot if you run over a deadline. In fact, we’ve become so accustomed to missing deadlines that rescheduling has become an acceptable practice. But it’s still not exactly productive.
Even those who have designed a perfect workflow from start to finish can find themselves chasing down deadlines. So if you’re still trying to get on top of overdue tasks, it’s worth looking at the following 5 reasons why you’re still missing those important due dates.
1. You’re Not Communicating Properly With Your Team
Good communication and effective collaboration are both essential components of a productive team. The project will be doomed from the start if team members are unsure about the project scope and what’s required of them. Likewise, if project managers aren’t kept in the loop about why deadlines are being missed, they won’t be able to develop a better system.
This is why it’s essential that communication is clear and consistent throughout the project so that everyone is up to speed on items such as deliverables, requirements, and the roles and responsibilities of each team member. You need to make sure that everyone is engaged and on board and that any issues are voiced and addressed from the outset. This is how you create an actual “team” that works together rather than a bunch of people simply working on the same project with no singular shared objective.
Using Buckets to manage your projects will give you a birds-eye view of how the project is progressing at all times and provide the freedom to collaborate with your team members from anywhere once you have a digital device at hand.
2. You Don’t Have A Task Management System In Place
Using a task manager (preferably Buckets!) will help you to manage your deadlines by organizing all of your projects, tasks, and due dates in one place. A great way to stay ahead of deadlines in Buckets is to assign a due date a day or two in advance of the actual task deadline. This means you have a heads-up a few days before it’s due so you don’t have to pull that dreaded all-nighter if it’s slipped your mind!
“I love deadlines!”… “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
In Buckets, you can assign due date Reminders to Checklists, individual Checklist Items, and Cards. You can also prioritize your tasks according to importance using colored Labels to differentiate between them at a glance. It can seem difficult to prioritize when you have a gigantic task list, but it’s super important to master the art of prioritizing properly if you want to start hitting those deadlines on time.
3. You Don’t Have Actionable Steps In Place
If you’re working on a big project it‘s easy to get vague with the project scope/description. This is why we have the Notes feature in Buckets so that you can add all of the detail needed in order to complete the task. In addition, Buckets Checklists enable you to break the project down into all of the small steps you need to undertake before it’s completed.
Don’t be scared to get specific with your task list — it’s the best way to avoid procrastination and make sure you get everything done correctly and on time.
4. You’re Getting Distracted Too Often!
In a 2018 Udemy study, 74% of Millennials and Gen Z reported being distracted at work and 46% said it made them feel unmotivated. Distractions are an absolute killer when it comes to achieving the flow state we all thrive in at work and email is a key culprit. US workers check their email every 15 minutes a day on average. And those 15 minutes start to add up! For more on how email is destroying your productivity, check out this post we wrote a while back.
Other distractions come in the form of Slack chats (it’s worth changing your status to “away” when you’re trying to get some deep work done) and phone notifications. In Buckets, we’ve found a way to mitigate the distraction of phone notifications by introducing Custom Notifications for the Buckets app as well as giving users the ability to turn email and push notifications on/off. Push Notifications allow you to control the alerts that pop up on your mobile device, and you can also customize your Email Notifications to limit the updates hitting your inbox.
5. You’re Multitasking
Multitasking is the antithesis of all things good in this world. Okay.. that might be a stretch too far, but it’s still not your best bet for hitting deadlines. What you know as “multitasking: is actually a process called task switching which occurs when your brain rapidly moves from one task to another and back again. You’re giving your brain a workout it really doesn’t need, because it’s already focused on sprinting towards the due date for your other task!
You can read more about the effects of multitasking in our blog post “The Myth Of Multitasking”, but for now all you need to know is that you should avoid it if you want to hit those deadlines.
Are There Any Other Reasons You Miss Deadlines?
What else makes you miss deadlines or leave them until the last minute?! Share your experiences with us in the comments section below, we’d love to hear from you!
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