It’s lot easier to get things done ON TIME than you thought

‘Oh how wonderful life would be if only I had a couple of more hours to finish this.’ That’s the story of almost every second professional working out there.

The world in which we live in today, everyone is fighting a battle with time. Seldom do we finish things within deadlines. Everyone is always running late when it comes to delivering the work assigned to them.

So I decided to figure out what teams can do to get things completed on time? To my surprise, everyone was making the same mistakes. I’m going to talk about those mistakes in this post, and how you can rectify them to get on the right track.

Plan. Action. Iterate.

Planning things is not the problem. It’s spending too much time on creating the perfect plan which is the problem. In the ideal world there is nothing we can call as perfect. It is important to pan out the details, but spending weeks doing just that is the issue. Because you never know things might not work out the way you intend them to do in th real world.

To fight this problem, I’ve come up with this three-step planning approach -

• Plan
• Take Action
• Iterate

You cannot do without a plan, but planning is not the only thing. You need to draft a plan, leave some scope for changes, and straight away start acting on it. It’s great if you are able to hit the bull’s eye in first. Even if you don’t, you will still have time for iterations and start anew.

Focus on just one thing at a time

Human brain is not meant for multitasking. We cannot focus on even two things at a time, forget about handling more than that. I understand that we are a part of competitive world where we always have more things in our platter than we can handle. But that does not mean you should bite off more than you can chew.

You won’t even realize it, but by working simultaneously on more than one tasks you are crushing your brain’s productivity cells. This is where something called prioritization comes into the picture.

Rather than taking on too many things at once, organize tasks on the basis of priority and get on finishing them one by one. This will ensure that there is no compromise on quality, because you are focused a 100% only on one task. And at the same time will save time as you will not have to rework on those tasks.

Leave interruptions at the door

The biggest problem that stands between you and deadlines is the constant interruptions. The flood of emails, social media notifications, pings, small help to team members and what not. All these things can add up to eat a big part of your day. And you can say Bye Bye to project deadlines.

I am sure everyone can relate to this scenario. Not the only solution for this problem is to leave these interruptions at the door when you are entering the work. Don’t get into the literal word-by-word meaning. What I mean here is to fix a specific time of the day for all this so that these interruptions don’t keep bugging you constantly.

By following this small time management tip, you can eventually save a lot of your time. You can stay ahead of your deadlines and make your life a happy one.

Talk about it

I read this quote somewhere — a lot of problems in the world would disappear if we talked to each other instead of talk about each other. And how true is that. The root cause of many problems in companies is because people working in them don’t talk to each other.

For instance, if you are having problems meeting your deadlines it can be a good idea to discuss with your team-members or maybe your manager. Who knows they might share some tips for the same. Or, maybe the manager was not aware that you are working on so many things at the same time. And after you talking to him, he might iterate your tasks. These small things could make a BIG difference in helping you meet deadlines and stay on the track always!

That’s all I have to share with you. If you like this post, don’t forget to share and comment on it. And if you have some of your own tips for getting things done on time, then do share them in the comments. I’d love to hear them out.

Want to become happier at work? Stop relying on emails and switch to ProofHub!

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Vartika Kashyap is a seasoned marketing professional who is an expert in digital marketing and entrepreneurship. She’s been featured among LinkedIn’s Top Voices for the year 2016. She currently runs the marketing team at ProofHub — a project management software for teams of all sizes. Connect with Vartika on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.

Also follow our company page @ProofHub to get the recent updates about our tool, published articles, motivational quotes & presentations.

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Originally published at LinkedIn.