If you go through any project plans, you are sure to find overdue tasks marked with red lines and red dates. These red dates mainly symbolize overdue works and in worst scenarios for unplanned future works. These surely affect the companies planning, its working principals and the morals of the employees. Main reasons behind this missing out of deadlines are poor work management and lack of clarity of the job. People on the first hand don’t actually understand the time and effort required for a specific job and say yes to the job. On the other hand they lack clarity that is they don’t properly understand what job they have been assigned.

So, lets figure out the ways by which one can fix this problem.

• Rearrange and Guess Estimate

A very easy and effective way is by rescheduling the work plan by adding new deadlines, add dates to earlier unfinished tasks and add estimates to tasks that have not been taken into account seriously.

Sometimes it is quite hard to foretell the exact date and then you must make a guess estimate and be practical. The key to proper estimation is to research on your experience with similar tasks done before and also add a learning time. By this way not only will you finish your task in exact time but you also will learn new things while experimenting.

• Divide and Conquer

If you are having a hard time estimating then you must break down the job even more. It makes things easier to estimate and assign resources in proper and correct places.

You may also create a work break down flowchart where you can divide each task in to further many short tasks just for the sake of proper estimating and getting things done in time.

• Don’t accept things you can do

It is not actually possible for a person to do all kinds of jobs that has been assigned to him. So you must carefully judge the job before accepting it. Nowadays one may be forced to take up a job due to peer pressure, executive pressure, etc and hence are left with a lot of deadlines and unfinished assignments. So you must choose wisely. Sometimes it is okay to say no or reject a job by justifying with the amount of work load. Doing ad-hoc work is quite fine, but accepting too much ad-hoc works may break your focus from the real task that you were supposed to complete.  Helping out you colleague is a good thing but that must not interrupt your work schedule.

• Don’t get struck down in Details

Perfectionists often despise deadlines because they want everything to be totally perfect and they don’t provide a conductive environment for their high standards.  The good news is that you don’t have to perfect always and on the first iteration. When you are working on a project you can always follow the 80/20 rule. Just try to keep focus on the tasks that can earn higher and greater results and the little things will take care of themselves.