Calculated deadlines for entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, if you want to achieve your Goals, You need to set strategic deadlines. Deadlines are important for helping you achieve both large and small goals.

However, you won’t instantly find success in the world of business by just setting arbitrary deadlines for all of your projects. Your deadlines need to set you up for success—they must be strategic.

Strategic deadlines are designed to help you move closer to your goals every day in a way that keeps you experiencing small wins along the way, rather than simply painting a huge target months away that just adds to your stress levels.

Trust me! I’ve learned this the hard way over the course of years, so now strategic deadlines are a core part of my opportunity management system. For most people, still, few things cause worry, stress and panic as much as deadlines.

Forget the notion of deadlines keeping you awake at night, drowning in anxiety. This is mostly just negative psychology, the planning fallacy, or a common case of procrastination. Reasonable, strategic deadlines actually do the opposite.

For entrepreneurs, strategic deadlines are important. They hold you accountable for your own goals. Very few things have the attention-grabbing power of deadlines when it comes to setting a purpose and defining the timeline for anything important that needs to be done. Whether a deadline has been set by a customer, manager or yourself, it places all stakeholders on the same page, working towards a common objective. If you give yourself a personal deadline, you create a critical metric by which your action, or inaction, may be deemed a failure or a success. In these situations, only you have the sole responsibility for the outcome. Strategic deadlines keep momentum moving in a positive direction. People who set strategic deadlines tend to work towards meeting that deadline.

Positive action—however small—moves you closer to achieving a goal, the more progress you make towards your meaningful milestones, the more attainable the end result feels. Once you’ve established the right pace for your incremental progressions, all it takes to meet your deadline is to keep the momentum going.

Deadlines help you to prioritise and focus only on most important matters. They directly impact your time (and everyone else’s). Therefore, they force you to organize your tasks in order of priority, so that you’re only working on objectives that move you closer to your most meaningful goals.

They keep you honest and reluctant to make promises you can’t keep. They are for everyone’s benefit but you don’t have to say “yes” to all of them. In fact, if you recognize that a proposed deadline is too unrealistic for you to be able to deliver quality work, it’s your responsibility to push back and make sure you won’t sacrifice end results in exchange for rushing to get your deliverable shipped.

Some deadlines will hold back from achieving a good outcome, instead of making it easier to obtain. In fact, unreasonable deadlines—together with procrastination, poor time management, inefficiencies and other factors—may contribute to failure of meeting deadlines.

To ensure that your deadlines help you deliver positive results time and time again, consider adopting the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) framework or a similar approach to setting strategic goals. Make sure to define specific and attainable goals for each stakeholder in the project so that everyone is held accountable. Set reasonable milestones and corresponding deadlines by engaging everyone and getting their feedback on how best to schedule a task or project.

Use deadline to create positive change.

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