For many, deadlines are a dreadful matter. You may procrastinate till the deadline approaches and fail to complete the task in time despite your last moment efforts.

Missed deadlines can have a negative impact on your productivity and impression in both personal and professional life alike. Check out the points explained here to find out how you can meet every deadline with ease.

1. Create Many Bite-Sized Milestones

An illustration of milestone written on asphault

Do complex and time-taking tasks lead you to procrastinate? If yes, then you’re not alone. Sometimes, your mind feels overwhelmed and demotivates you to work until the last moment.

That's why you must break down your ambitious goals into smaller milestones. For example, if your target is to complete a 50-page assignment, you can divide it into small chapters and work on one chapter each.

Once you do this, your subconscious will not feel overburdened. Instead, the small deadlines will seem manageable and motivate you to get started with the work. As you continue to achieve all the small milestones one after another, reaching the big objective won't be difficult.

2. Find a Motivating Partner

Working alone is difficult—especially when it involves a complex task. While working alone gives you freedom, you can also end up being someone with no motivation to complete the work. As you’re not accountable to anyone about your personal deadlines, missing milestones can become commonplace.

If you’re having trouble managing your self-imposed deadlines, you can always involve someone else. It would be nice to have someone who knows about your deadlines. This accountability partner can be someone from your family or friends.

To finish reading a chapter, you can loop in a classmate and study together. If you can't find a partner, even knowing about someone who achieved the same milestone will be inspiring.

3. Always Keep Track of Progress

An image showing tracking reports or project progress

Making progress tracking a daily habit will help you finish a task on time. Even if you set a deadline, that doesn't mean you'll finish it on the last day. This means you will work on the project for multiple days to complete it before the deadline.

You may not be equally productive during all these working days. However, regularly tracking the progress will help you identify the gaps and let you make up for your weak points.

You can use MeisterTask to track how much progress you have made on any task. You can add any number of tasks to it and track their progress as you work on them each day.

4. Avoid Leaving Loopholes in the Planning

Before coming up with a deadline for personal tasks, you must have gone through a detailed planning process. Knowing the objectives, working process, and available time are some things you should consider before fixing a deadline. Having issues with your planning can cost you the deadline.

There’s no point blaming yourself for missing a deadline if you had flaws in your planning process. For instance, you need to borrow some books from a library to finish a project by Monday. You did the planning for Friday, but the library stays closed on Saturday and Sunday.

As you can see, there is a loophole in this scheme. Due to this, you are bound to miss the deadline here. To avoid such circumstances, make sure your work plan doesn’t have any flaws.

5. Keep Distractions at Bay

Someone using mobile during office hours

Distractions are one of the biggest reasons why you’re unable to complete tasks in time. Long emails, social media notifications, urgent but less important tasks, a family member stopping by to chit-chat—all these distract you from your goals and hamper your workflow.

Once your mind is diverted to something else, it’s tough to bring back the same concentration and attention to your original work. When you’re into a task, try to make as much progress as possible in one go.

You can mute your mobile and computer notifications to avoid distraction. Using anti-distraction apps is also useful to keep you focused during working hours.

6. Use an Efficient Calendar Tool

If you have too many things on your plate, losing sight of the deadlines and pending tasks can happen. The best way to be aware of your tasks and deadlines is to use a calendar tool. Such apps will help you schedule tasks, events, and meetings.

Keeping track of your past and future deadlines and milestones becomes easy with the calendar software. These apps let you visualize the upcoming deadlines in a sorted manner. Check these tools daily to stay on track of your to-do tasks for the day.

Google Calendar is a calendar scheduling app that you can use for your personal and professional task scheduling. It also supports integration with different project management tools that make deadline visualization effortless.

7. Use a Soft Deadline

A graphical representation of soft deadline

A soft deadline is a tentative deadline you put before the original one. In case you’re wondering whether a soft deadline can help you, the answer is yes. It’s not only helpful for professional projects. Soft deadlines are equally effective for personal milestones.

Even the best-laid plans can experience hiccups. You can fall sick or have some technical issue. Don't let these force you to miss a deadline. Have a soft deadline in place and try to finish the work before that.

Besides saving your back during any unexpected events, it’ll ensure the timely completion of a task.

8. Avoid Procrastination at Any Cost

People procrastinating during work

Most of you would agree that procrastination is the reason why you keep missing deadlines, even the self-imposed ones. While task complexity is responsible for this in most cases, sometimes people might procrastinate as there is no reward for finishing a task.

Procrastination becomes more common in personal tasks that do not involve any supervisor or reward. But, you can always treat yourself after finishing work on time. It’ll inspire you to avoid procrastination next time.

Related: The Top Tips to Avoid Procrastination and Meet Deadlines

Timely Task Completion Increases Productivity

Deadlines should not be stressful and demotivating. Instead, it should motivate you to complete the tasks in time. You can follow the things mentioned here to meet your self-created deadlines.

You should also avoid delays in your professional life at any cost by finding out the possible reasons and their solutions.