Entice Yourself Into Meeting Your Deadlines by Making Them Urgent
Setting a deadline for yourself can be great or completely useless, depending on how you feel about it. You can improve your chances of meeting your deadlines by setting them next to the present.
Curbing procrastination is arguably the most important aspect of staying productive, and missing deadlines is one of the easiest ways to procrastinate. If you want to help yourself get serious about your deadlines, University of Toronto marketing professor Dilip Soman recommends sticking to deadlines as close to current ones as possible:
“People don’t think of future periods of time as a continuous flow of time. They don’t think about the number of days left until a decision or task is completed, but rather they tend to categorize future interim results – thinking about the deadline coming next week / month / year, not this one. When the deadline is far in the future, we tend to put a task on the back burner, believing that we have plenty of time to tackle it. Things left in the background stay there longer than they should, because there are many other things that catch our attention as being relatively urgent. “
So keep your deadlines short. Set deadlines within one week or month and stick to them. If you need to make it even more urgent, set a deadline for today. When you do this urgently, your mind sees time as a limited resource and you can control yourself. We are all caught with the words, “I’ll get there someday,” but you can make your goals that much more realistic by forcing yourself to start sooner rather than later.
How to force yourself to meet deadlines | Fast Company