How to Meet Your Deadlines :: Process Essays

How to Meet Your DeadlinesIts a gorgeous fall day and my mind is aimless like a dinghy on the lake. But Im inside my provide watching the clock tick a representation, hoping to pull together this essay in the beginning the deadline arrives. If youre like me, deadlines drive you crazy, but they also keep you driven. Chances are, youve spent immeasurable nights awake, fretting over an upcoming deadline, even ones that are easy to meet. The Pressure CookerSo how can you handle the pressure -- real and imagined -- of deadlines? And what should you do if it looks like youre personnel casualty to miss one? Here are a few tips on handling the dreaded D-word.Always meet your deadlines. Theres simply no excuse, piffling of calamity not to. As Cameron Foote writes in The Business Side of creativity Youre very raison detre is to do for others what they cannot or will not do for themselves. When you bring an assignment, the client expects you to be competent, professional, and most of all a fanatic close meeting his or her deadlines.Treat deadlines with the respect they deserve. Woody Allen once said, 80 percent of life is just sho amaze alongg up. Youll be amazed and how often(prenominal) return business you can earn simply by organism on cadence. Negotiate longer lead times. Deadlines are like money, they arent tardily renegotiated. Even if you think you can meet the proposed deadline with little problem, its best to win yourself a little extra time during the initial negotiation.Extra time acts as insurance should a work or personal touch arise or if the job becomes inexplicably complex. The slack can also come in handy if you need to accommodate a rush job, specially one with extra dollars attached. Ask for an extra day or week or month, whatever is appropriate to the work you do and the scope of the project. Whenever you pelf talking to a client or so a deadline, think about your kids, significant other, or beloved hobby, and silently ask yourself I s this deadline going to hinder me from spending time with the people or activities I love? If nobody more, this ploy gives you the incentive to ask for that extra week or two. suspension up chores into manageable pieces. Perhaps the problem is not the deadline, so much as the sheer size of a project you face. One way to battle this daunting specter is by creating a Gantt chart to break out the project into smaller chunks.