By Peter Turla, TimeMan.com
There’s an old saying, “If it weren’t for the last minute, a lot of things would never get done.”
Have you ever noticed how much you can do when you have a tight deadline? Deadlines help you to focus better. Without a deadline to create a sense of urgency, it’s easy to be distracted, get sidetracked, and drift into an “I can always do this later” mode of working. After a while, you could find yourself overwhelmed with a backlog of work.
To avoid being swamped with work, learn to work with a controlled sense of urgency, even on items that don’t have tight deadlines. Avoid getting into an “I can always work late and get it done” style of working because once you do, it’s easy to slide into an inefficient style of working, risk losing focus, and get sloppy with your overall time management.
If you don’t have any pressing deadlines, create a sense of urgency to help improve your focus and motivate you. Imagine, for example, that you are part of a carpool and it’s critical to finish work every day by a certain time, so you don’t keep people waiting. You can also use this technique if you work at home. Give yourself a self-imposed deadline for when to quit work each day.
In addition to your end-of-the-day deadline, the time you want to quit work, you can give yourself a series of short deadlines throughout the day so that you work in short sprints. For example, aim to finish editing an article, make an important call, or answer an important email by lunch. Don’t create unrealistic deadlines that’ll stress you out; make them realistic enough to challenge you to focus and stay productive.
Remember that your personal life is important as well as your business life. Don’t get overly caught up in the rat race at work. There’s an old saying: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”
By pretending that you must catch your car-pool ride home, you’ll motivate yourself to rethink what you’re doing and focus on the truly important items. The bonus is that you’ll avoid burnout when you quit work at a decent hour and have more time for a personal life.
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