Use Reverse Scheduling to Get Your Projects Completed on Time
When planning a project, it’s best to start from the beginning, right? If you are nearing the deadline, you might actually want to cancel it. Start with a deadline and work backwards.
As writer and psychology graduate student Welton Chang explains, “reverse scheduling” works when your deadline is checked first. You know the due date, so you know how much time you have to get the project completed. From there, you can work in reverse. How much do you need to get done the day before the deadline? A week earlier? By examining these milestones in reverse order, you can get a clearer idea of how much you need to get done in a given time frame:
First, I use reverse scheduling to make sure I have enough time to complete what I need to do. I adopted this technique in the army. Start with a deadline and work from there gradually, estimating reasonable timelines for the critical things you need to do as you progress towards your goal. If you cannot meet the deadline, then you know that the deadline is not reasonable and you need to adjust it. You do this before you have to push back the deadline at the last minute.
An alternative that so many of us take is to start with the first step and work on it for as long as we feel it is necessary, eating up the time needed for future steps. The end result is that when you run out of time, you have to rush through all the final work, which leads to the worst outcome. Reverse scheduling allows you to structure your work at a reasonable pace and gives you the freedom to do quality work.
Good planning and organization is the key to productivity | Middle