There are many factors that come into play when managing a project. Team members could need time off, clients could add more tasks, or a piece of software you’re using could have sudden downtime. All can have an effect on reaching that deadline.

Using the below tips can help hit those project deadlines and negate the small inconveniences you’ll experience along the way.

1. Time Block your Schedule

This fool-proof plan for managing life can also be beneficial for your whole team. Time blocking is when you assign certain tasks and projects a “time block”. For example, I want to finish writing this article efficiently. I dedicated a block of 1.5 hours to my schedule, from 10 am to 11:30 am. This lets me focus my efforts into a small portion of my day so that it doesn’t interfere with other things I need to do today.

Aside from being more efficient, time blocking also has another perk for reaching deadlines, it discourages multitasking. When we multitask, we tend to go in a state called “scattered focus”. While on paper, it does sound nice to accomplish many things at once, in reality, it not only wastes time, but also leaves us with less quality output.

2. Use Parkinson’s Law

The law states that “work expands to fill the time”. This implies that if you schedule a task deadline to be “within a day”, then most likely, it’s going to take you the whole day to finish it. Being more concise and setting it to 2 hours, you will find that you are motivated to fully dedicate your time to those 2 hours to complete the task.

Even though projects can span a period of days, weeks, or months, setting more concise deadlines and durations for tasks can help you hit those targets.

3. Automate the Process

Bill Gates once said that lazy people make the best employees. Why? Because they are able to find easier solutions for hard tasks - such as automating tasks and processes. Your calendar reminders are great for reminding you of events. Sending different email campaigns based on different client types can save you so much time.

There are now many tools that can help you automate your processes and tasks, which brings us to our final idea.

4. Invest in a Project Management Tool

One of these tools would be a project management tool and being able to see all your projects in a neat and professional fashion can be a game changer when it comes to meeting deadlines. 

When meeting deadlines, the capacity of your team is a critical matter so we suggest finding a tool that allows you visualize your project schedule based on actual resources as most project management tools are siloed and based on task lists.

Smartoo for example has many features such as project planning, resource booking, monthly cashflow insights, project milestones, and much more. A software that helps the daily struggles of project managers to meet project deadlines in a SMART, clean, and affordable way.