One thing is rigidly sure in the workplace or a corporate structure. The leader is responsible for the attitude the employees or team members display towards work. Your job as a leader is to guide, instruct, trust, train, and motivate them. While you don’t have to do these things personally, you need to create a sustainable structure for attaining them. Oh! One thing which must also flow from you as the leader is the ability of your employees or team members to meet deadlines.
If you have a writing company, the centre of your existence is deadlines. Look at a writer like your future career for instance. Some of them are building a reputation for meeting deadlines to get more jobs than others. You can reach their levels and surpass them even, but you have to attain a particular mindset about deadlines. You don’t necessarily have to fear deadlines or target time, as people also call it.
While other businesses can decide to wing it, your writing business can’t. Contrary to what you have learned, you don’t need to have sleepless nights or drink strong coffee. Fear and anxiety wouldn’t even have a touch on you. Admittedly, you need tips to reach this state where a deadline is nothing more than another word. These tips will help you refine your ability to keep to deadlines while maintaining superb quality.
7 Proven Tips For Meeting Writing Deadlines
A quick note. Sometimes, it can be impossible to meet your writing deadlines, but this has to be occasionally. The keyword here is occasionally. Frequently missing deadlines could be damaging for your writing business.
You can train your employees with these tips and watch how they will become more productive and meet their target times.
Meeting Deadlines Starts from your Mind.
Hitting your target time starts from your mind. Ordinarily, when people hear deadlines, they get stressed, fearful, and anxious. They feel all of these negative emotions without actually starting the work yet. The time they should spend working, they spend worrying, and this gets progressively worse as the target time closes in on them.
As a team leader or an employer, you have to train your employees to strengthen their minds against stress from deadlines. If your company budget permits, you can hire a psychologist to help them. If not, tell them to have a philosophy. Their philosophy regarding writing and meeting deadlines should be, ‘start early, start small and let it build up till completion.’
We can’t stress this enough. Beating deadlines starts from the mind, and you have to train your employees or team members to guard their minds against fear, stress, and anxiety.
Start Early, Start Small: Create Outlines.
Ordinarily, when you want to write and want to make the writing process easier and enjoyable, you need outlines after researching. Outlines serve as a writing guide for you when it comes to writing and helps your work become better. If you want to become a better and more articulate writer, we recommend that you try to draw a design of how you want your writing to go.
The best thing about these outlines is how they are flexible, and you can change them as you deepen your research. For deadlines, your writing design gives you an idea of how your article would go, which is one of the best things. This way, you will have an idea of splitting your writing into different parts and the time you can give these parts.
Split Writing into Smaller Parts
Good. You have your outline, and with it, you can predict the flow of your writing, and you can also use it to break your work down. So, instead of having one long task, you can have multiple short ones. You would be doing what your brain wants when you do this. Research has shown that the brain becomes more productive when facing a shorter task.
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day but gradually. If you decide to see the writing task as a giant you must slay, you can trigger fear, anxiety, and stress, the very things we want to avoid. So avoid scaring your brain. It’s unproductive to do so. Remember, start small and let that small become big. Write gradually, steadily, and consistently.
Add Deadlines to Each Smaller Part.
You have broken your writing into different parts. The next thing you need to do is add a time target to each section. The idea is not to scare you, but with your outline and research, you should have an estimate of how much time each part will cost you. The idea of deadlines in each small section is to keep you on course for the final deadlines.
With your personal target time for each part, you can maintain a proper course for the final target time.
So if the deadline of 48 hours. Imagine having 5 parts to write as you have split your writing into smaller pieces. Through your outline and research, you should know the amount of time writing these parts will take. Then let’s say you have arrived at 35 hours, give or take as your deadline. Divide the 35 by the 5 sections. This means you have 7 hours for the 5 parts.
Reward yourself for Completing Each Part.
To sustain your motivation and meet your finishing time, you need to reward yourself for completing each part. Let your reward be something that won’t distract you from completing the other parts. For instance, some people’s idea of rewarding themselves is watching movies. You can’t incorporate that within your writing time frame. Although you have completed a step, there are more steps to follow.
Your reward should motivate you and not make you feel bored with the writing. It would be best if you didn’t overdo rewarding yourself. If you want to do something major, finish the task first.
Avoid the Villain that is Multitasking.
Multitasking is a scam. Avoid it thoroughly. When it comes to writing, you may feel you should write a bit out of each of your parts but doing this could cause problems for you. You need a different approach. You need to focus on a part, finish it and move to the other section. Some people have pushed multitasking as a hallmark of intelligence. From our experience, it isn’t. Our brain is more productive when it focuses on a task per time.
Alternating between tasks could confuse the brain and cause you to make different inelegant mistakes in your writing. Multitasking is a recipe for disorganisation, and it could harm your writing. During your employee or team training, stress to your employees and teammates that they should be wary of multitasking. After all, studies show we don’t truly multitask, but we change focus. So you essentially forget one thing to do another.
Ask for Assistance.
As a leader, you should know the importance of communication and unity within a team. Your employees or teammates must also know this. Writing can be exhausting at times, and a teammate could be struggling for whatever reason. It would help if you created an environment where such challenged teammates could ask for writing assistance. If they cannot write, it means you are ending towards a collision course with the deadline.
When the communication lines in your company are open, you can assist struggling writers. You can quickly reassign the writing task and prevent missing the finishing time.
Conclusion
Deadlines don’t have to be scary. Read the above tips and improve your ability to beat deadlines.