Learn and Work Smarter

124. How to Meet Tight Deadlines (Without Losing Your Mind)

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 124

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Deadlines don't care how overwhelmed you feel. Tight deadlines? Those require a completely different approach — more urgency, more intensity, and a clear plan for execution.


In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter Podcast, I break down six strategies for meeting tight deadlines without losing your mind. Part one covers three pre-work strategies that take maybe 10 minutes total. Part two covers three execution strategies to actually get the dang thing done.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why clarity on your deliverable is the most critical first step — and what happens when you skip it
  • How to make time visible (time is math, not a feeling) and schedule work into real, specific slots
  • The three options when the math doesn't math and you don't have enough time to meet your deadline
  • Why setup and starting are one combined step, and what that looks like in practice
  • How to work in contained chunks with specificity so you're not wasting precious minutes deciding what to do
  • 5 micro strategies for locking in

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Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 124. I'm Katie Azevedo. Today's episode is definitely for our students and our working professionals, because today we're talking about deadlines, and that is something that all of us have, no matter what stage we're in. So specifically we're talking about how to meet tight deadlines without losing your mind. So there are two keywords in the title here. Tight deadlines and losing your Mind. I guess that's more than two keywords, but two key concepts.'cause there's definitely strategies for meeting regular deadlines, and some of those will certainly apply here today. But I wanna talk specifically about tight deadlines because that added urgency requires a different approach and honestly, some more intensity. On your end, and then the second part is losing your mind because we don't want any of that here. The whole point of this show is to teach ways to learn and work smarter, to implement systems that enable us to do that, to give you the mindset and the strategies to be able to tweak your systems, to assess when they're working, to assess when they're not working, and to make the necessary adjustments in those scenarios. And the goal is always to do all of that without losing our minds. If you are watching the show on YouTube, I would love if you subscribed left a comment below the video, maybe let me know your thoughts, your questions, your feedback, or just say hi. If you are listening in a podcast player, make sure you follow the show by tapping that plus sign that is somewhere. You can share it too with an arrow. Just click on something that really helps a lot. And then finally join me on Instagram at School Habits to stay connected throughout the week between our Thursday episodes. Okay, so today's show is divided into two parts. Part one contains three pre-work strategies that are gonna set you up right to meet those tight deadlines without losing your mind. And then part two contains three execution strategies so you can get the darn thing done.'cause we don't wanna spend all our time planning, right? That's not how we meet tight deadlines without losing our mind. Alright, let's begin. Now before we get started, let me be frank. No strategy I give you today can replace the most critical one of all. You have to do the work. If you have a tight deadline, whether it's due to procrastination, no judgment, or maybe something that is beyond your control that happens like a teacher or professor just out of nowhere or give you something to do, you have to start immediately. The only way to get the work done is to do the work. That is the strategy right there. Heck, I could just end the episode right there if I wanted to. Got a deadline coming up. Do the work. No more planning. No more procrast to planning. No more woe is me. I am so overwhelmed. Yes, overwhelmed is normal, but we've got to do the work. Overwhelmed or not. I mean, you can choose not to, but then we're not meeting that deadline. Right. And that is a whole different journey. Now that Ted talk is out of the way. So let's get into part one, which is three pre-work strategies. Strategy number one is to define the deliverable with precision. So in other words, we wanna get totally clear on what exactly you're turning in on that tight deadline. It's not enough to say a presentation or a report or an essay. If you're a student, is there a rubric? How many sources do you need? How many pages does it have to be? If it's a presentation for work, like what data are you supposed to report on? Who's the audience? What's it supposed to look like? I can't tell you how many times I've sat with a student who's freaking out about an essay due the next day. Maybe it's an essay they haven't even started, and they have no idea how long it's supposed to be. They don't even know what the prompt is. They don't know anything about it. They were just too scared to even click on the assignment itself. That is the worst approach ever clarity. Kills procrastination. Remember that. When we have total clarity about what the heck is do in the first place, then we can get started. It's usually not as bad as we imagine it to be. Pre-work strategy number two is to figure out when you're gonna do the work. I can't emphasize enough how critical this is. The work cannot happen if you don't know when you're gonna do it. Not generally when, but specifically what day and what time. You've heard me talk about this on the show before, but this is all about making time visible. Time is not a feeling like, I think I'll have time on Wednesday. I feel like Thursday might work. That's nonsense. Time is math. It is numbers, it is real. It can be measured, counted, and calculated. And so if you're a student, this means looking at your calendar, seeing what's open and scheduling the work to happen. If you're not currently set up in a calendar system, do that. I teach you the best approach for managing time and calendars inside School Habits University. But to get started, you can use the free Weekly planner that I have for you guys linked in the show notes and in the description box. It is perfect for this exact purpose. And what you're doing is you're saying, okay, I am in school for these three hours, or I'm at work for these hours. These are my commitments after school. These are my commitments after work. Those are the times that are unavailable for me to work on this project. Okay, so what is open? And you find the pockets. And we are being realistic about our commute time too. So many people forget this.'cause sometimes I'll work with, you know, kids and professionals too who say like, oh, I can do that after work, or I can do that after school, or I can do that after my game. And they're not accounting for the fact that like, you know, they have a 45 minute commute or maybe it's an away game. And driving, driving to and from places takes very real time. And that's time. You have to subtract from the time you were planning to do your work. Right? and it might be that when you make time visible like this, you realize that you were planning to work on a project on Thursday, but on Thursday you literally only have 23 minutes and the entire day. Okay, well that means that you have to start on Wednesday. And maybe you weren't planning to start on Wednesday because you like Wednesday to be like more of a chill day. Yeah. Well that's not gonna work when you have a tight deadline to meet. It's not gonna work in a situation like this. Now, where people lose their minds is when they don't plan and they don't realize that Thursday is off the table. They, so they didn't utilize Wednesday and now it's Thursday night and they're freaking out, realizing that the thing is due on Friday and they're kicking themselves thinking, oh my gosh, they should have, should have started that on Wednesday. Correct. But you only would've known that if you had taken this first step of figuring out when you're gonna do the work. Alright, the third step. So the final step of the uh, part one pre-work strategies is to adjust expectations based on reality. Now to be honest, this isn't something we can do if we don't do step one and step two. So step one was to get total clarity on what the heck we're even doing. And then step two is to figure out the reality of our time constraints so we know when we're doing this thing. And now we might need to make adjustments because sometimes after going through step one and two, we realize that the math doesn't math. You figured out how much time you really have available over the next few days to work on the thing, and it is simply not enough time. So what do we do then? Well, there are essentially three options. One of them might not sound very good or realistic, depending on what the situation is, but I'm gonna throw it out there. Here's always an option. Don't do the thing, but don't meet the deadline. But I am assuming that, you know, the premise of this episode is that if you have a fast approaching deadline and the deadline is kind of non-negotiable, that you can't just not do the thing, like you're gonna lose your job or you're gonna get a bad grade or whatever if you don't do the thing, right? So that's probably not the most realistic option for everybody. So what else can we do? There are two other more practical options. Find time. Notice I'm not saying make time. We can't do that. We're not magicians. And it drives me bananas when people are like, make time. No, find time. Okay, that's one option, or to lower the output level. That's the second option. I'm gonna talk about both starting with finding time. Now, it might be that in order to meet this deadline without losing your mind, you have to temporarily remove some commitments from your calendar over the next few days. Even if these commitments that your initial reaction is like, no way hear me out. I have worked with so many student athletes. I'm using student athletes as an example on purpose'cause like die hard, you can't miss a practice. You can't miss a game. Right. And, and during finals time, for example, when they have papers due and exams and all that, even these die hard student athletes sometimes have to not go to practice in order to find time to work on whatever's due. Yeah. In some cases that means, you know, you miss a practice the day before a game, you can't play in the game. But these are priorities that students have to determine for themselves. If you're a working professional, it might mean that you don't go to the committee meeting you agreed to that week. You don't go to the spin class you wanted to go to, you ask someone else to drive your kids to practice for a few days in a row. Like I'm not suggesting that we all become workaholics, but I'm suggesting that if we have a tight deadline, you have to meet, and if you don't have enough time in your day or in your week to meet that deadline, your options are don't meet the deadline or find the time. And this is how we find the time. Does it sometimes hurt? Yeah, sometimes. But it's temporary now the other option is to lower the output. Alright? So for example, if you're a student and you have to write an eight page paper with 10 sources, maybe this means that you write a six page paper with eight sources. Are you gonna get docked some points? Absolutely. But it's better than not doing the paper at all. if you are expected to design and deliver a presentation at work, okay, maybe it's not gonna be fine Art this time around and your slide deck looks really pretty darn ugly and a little embarrassing. But hey, if you got the data and it kind of works. Then it kind of works, and that's your minimum viable product. What is the least amount that you can do and still have it count as decently done? It might not be a hundred percent of the deliverable, but if it's 80%, could you live with that? Probably. Again, the consequence of an 80% delivery is probably better than no delivery at all. All right, so that wraps up part one here. The three things to handle or to think about or go through before you start the work. And that shouldn't, this shouldn't take, like the pre-work strategy should take like 10 minutes. Like five minutes, right? We're not like spending our time planning, especially not on our tight deadlines. So just to recap, it's one, get total clarity on the deliverable, so figure out what the heck you're doing. Number two is to figure out when you're doing it, and then number three, adjust your expectations or your calendar if needed to make it happen. But now we have to shift into actually doing the work because all of the planning doesn't mean diddly squat if we don't put our hands on the keyboard, our butts in our seats, or boots on the ground or bodies in the truck, or however you wanna say it. Okay, so now that is what we're gonna cover here in part two. And the very first step is to set up and start immediately. You've done your prep. I've given you three steps for prep. There should be no more preparation than that. Sometimes like mega preparation is a fancy form of procrastination. We call that procrast planning. I mean, who's we? We call that, I don't know. I've heard it me call that and I think it works. And we tell ourselves like, oh, I'm just gearing up. I'm just doing my due diligence. No, not when we have a tight deadline to meet. These things have to be a little bit different. So what do I mean by set up and start? It depends on what your project is, but I'm gonna go pretty basic here and say that let's, for an example, let's just say that it's some kind of essay or a report or something that you have to write, set up would mean. Get that Google Doc open. Give it a title. Throw some bullet points in there. Whatever you have to write, give it some structure. If it's an essay, drop the prompt in there. Slam a thesis at the top. Start plopping some bullet points in there. If it's a presentation, just maybe open up like a slide deck and create a bunch of slides, right? Just like duplicate each one. No design. Put placeholder texts on each one telling you at least what the content of each slide's gonna be. That is setting up and starting. Notice i'm not separating them into two separate steps because then we run the risk of taking forever on the setup. If we are stressed about deadlines, one of two things has happened. We already talked about this, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it again. Maybe it was beyond our control and the, the deadline was given to us without much notice at all, or we've already procrastinated, we've already done the excessive planning or the excessive thinking about it, and now it's time to take that action. It's a funny thing I saw, um, on Instagram the other day. I'm gonna get it wrong, but it said like, it was just like a, a quote post. It said in an unfortunate series of events if you have a bunch of things to do and you do them, they get done. There has to be a better way though. I thought it was funny, but it's true. If you have something that needs to get done, the only way to get it done is to do it. And that's what we're doing now. Okay, now we're moving on to step five, which is step two in part two, but step five overall. I don't know if that's confusing, like whatever. Hopefully you follow me. Work in contained chunks. So after step two in part one, which is figuring out how much time you really have available to work on your project, you should have some artifact of what that time really is. Maybe it's in your calendar. If you're using Google Calendar or Outlook, maybe you grabbed the free weekly planner template from the description box, whatever you're using. But at this point, you gotta know what times do I have available in a day to work on this thing? And now it's time for a little plug and play action. And we might have to get a little unorthodox here and color outside the lines, but that's okay. Nobody's gonna die. We can rally. Now, remember, I'm definitely not suggesting that anybody overwork or stay late at work forever when they don't have to. So please know that's not my angle. But when we're in a pickle like this and we have a deadline that we have determined is non-negotiable, sometimes we have to do things a little differently. Sometimes we have to rally, we have to work a little harder, maybe a little longer than we want to. That's just what we have to do. It should be the exception, not the norm, but we, we can do this. We're not gonna die. Like I said, I mean, technically you don't have to do this, but then we don't meet our deadline and then there's a consequence, but we're choosing that consequence. That's up to you. Not making the judgment call, but if you're saying no, hey, this is a deadline that I have to meet, okay, cool. So you have to be open to what I'm about to share. If you were honest in step two, you should now have clear chunks of time made visible in some way that you know are free to use to work on this project. And now we're gonna do the work in those chunks of time, even if those chunks of time you would rather dedicate to something else. For example, let's say that you're a college student and you typically don't like to do schoolwork on Thursday nights, that's when you see your friends, that's when you go out, that's when you unwind, sure. Fair enough. But if you have a deadline on Friday. You might have to tell your friends, you're gonna see them a different day. That Thursday slot is technically open to work on work, so technically that's what you should be doing. If you're a working professional, you might need to swap around your typical work day and maybe use chunks of time that you would usually dedicate to other things to work on this project. Maybe you don't check your email for a full day. Oh my gosh. Again, no one's gonna die if you don't check your email for a full day, so that you can have some un uninterrupted time to work on the work. And then this is important. When I say work on the work I'm talking about, not like general the work, the project, the essay. But I want you to be very specific. So when you're looking at this visual representation of time that you have available, again, let's just say that you're using the weekly planner I'm giving you, or Google calendar, you're saying, okay, from nine to 10 on Monday, I am collecting data from Q2, from two to three 30 on Monday, I'm collecting data from Q2. And then after work, hey, remember we have to rally maybe on Monday from six 30 to seven, I'm gonna create some graphic or chart maybe using AI with the data that I collected. Alright, so you know what you're doing on Monday. You're not walking into each of these work sessions being like, what am I gonna work on now? Because if you only have, let's say, 25 minutes to work on it, I don't want you spending 15 minutes deciding what to work on. Right? You're planning on that ahead of time. And if you don't know every single detail, because you're kind of like, I'll figure it out as I go kind of person, like fine, I respect that, but at least try to get as specific as possible, like data collection in this hour or QQ, like, I don't know. Um, make slides one through 10 in this chunk of time, try to give yourself some parameter. Because again, procrastination hates clarity. And when you know exactly what you're doing for how long you can sit down and do it. There's a lot of psychology behind that. Okay. Let's say for an example, you're a student writing an essay. Intro, maybe in one of your free blocks, first paragraph, maybe that you're gonna do that in your second free block. Maybe you don't know exactly what you're writing in your first paragraph. Doesn't matter. You can figure that part out as you go. But you do know, you know, on Thursday from five to six, you're working on that paragraph to work in contained chunks, remember that's this strategy here, working in contained chunks, you can use the Pomodoro technique, you can use a power hour, you can use um, some Pomodoro alternatives. I share three really kind of fun, i'm gonna say fun alternatives to the Pomodoro technique in one of my recent videos on school habits, um, that's my school habits YouTube channel, which is different from this one. I'm gonna leave that linked below. Um, that tends to be a channel where I have like all my study skills and student videos, but the Pomodoro variation video that I just posted recently that works for working professionals or anybody really, but I recommend working in chunks no longer than 90 minutes without a break. Students, I typically cap that at 45 minutes here. Productivity will honestly improve if you work in shorter chunks using a timer in between your work sessions. All right, the last step here, step six, lock in. Let me explain. I'm gonna combine some micro strategies here together in this tip that it can improve your ability to focus during your work blocks, or as the kids these days say lock in. Alright? You can use any of them. You can use all of them. You can mix and match. This is probably the meat of the episode right here, but it would've been irresponsible of me if I didn't like lay the groundwork up to this point. So first one, single task. Absolutely when you have a tight deadline, I don't want you multitasking like a little of this, like a little of that, a little of this that is only gonna stress us out. Remember the title is of this whole episode is how to do this without losing your mind and multitasking makes us lose our mind. So you're gonna write that intro. Cool. Sit down and write the intro from start to finish. I don't want you to write half the intro and then jump around and try to find like a source for your, you know, first body paragraph and then come back to the intro. No, it's one thing at a time. Number two, consider using a work sprint. I have a whole episode how to do a work sprint. That's episode, 80. This would be something, I'll leave that link in the description box and all that stuff, but that would be a strategy to use, the work sprint, If you had a large chunk of time or you made a large, oh no, not made, you found a large chunk of time in your schedule, maybe even a full day. Maybe even if you have a weekend day before your deadline is due on like a Monday or a a Tuesday or something. I won't get into all the details about work sprints here because I literally have that entire episode outlining it all. Again, it's episode 80. If that sounds alluring to you, it's one of my favorite strategies. Listen to that episode when you're done here. The next one, tell people what you're doing. You don't have to walk around your office and tell your colleagues like, Hey, I'm working on this thing, but what you do is that you tell them you're unavailable. You say, Hey, if you need me, try to catch me before one o'clock because I'm gonna be doing something from one to four. You could block out your work time in your calendar, so it looks like it's a meeting. If you have one of those shared calendars with your office, like where everybody can see whatever, that would drive me insane. Everyone can see what everybody's doing. Right? Block it off so that they know you're unavailable, unavailable. You don't have to say like what it is. You could just call in a meeting 'cause you have, it's a meeting with yourself, whatever. If you're a student, this could apply to you too. If someone's like, Hey, you wanna go out on Thursday? You say, Hey, I do, but I'm not going to. Or if you know that they're gonna ask you to go out on Thursday and it's Monday, you can say, Hey guys, I'm not gonna be going out with you on Thursday. Right. So you don't have to deal with it when they ask you on Thursday and your impulse controls a little low 'cause it's the end of the week and you're like, screw it, I'll just go out. No, you tell them ahead of time, don't even ask me. Right. Or you could tell them, Hey, I'm working on a project on Wednesday from four to seven, just so you know, I'm gonna be MIA for a little bit. If you're doing any of this work at home, you close your door, you tell your family, you tell your door mates. You can't exile your door mates, so maybe you have to be the one to leave and go to the library. Same thing with your family. You can't tell your family not to like be in their own home, but maybe you have to go somewhere. Okay? If it makes sense for your situation, give people the heads up that you're gonna be unavailable so that you don't have to answer to people or let people know in the middle of your work, like, oh, hey, sorry, I'm working on something. We wanna handle that in advance. Alright, another MicroStrategy. Put the phone away. I am so dead serious. This isn't a joke at this point. Our phones are literally the most distracting things in our entire universe. In the entire world, out of everything that exists, the phones are the most distracting thing. And if you're in a situation where you're stressed and you're trying not to lose your mind, and you're trying to meet a deadline and turn something in on time, and you have that deadline coming up, why on earth would you have the most distracting thing in the entire world anywhere near you? I don't want an upside down on the desk in front of you. I don't want it within your eyesight. Turn the darn thing off. Like power that baby down so you're not even tempted to bop it to check the time, which is gonna alert you to the 27,000 notifications you probably have on there. That whole, I'm not distracted by my phone story is nonsense, dude. Like I'm distracted by my phone and I know better. And I do have some ungodly amount of discipline and even my phone is distracting to me. Put it away. If you're doing your work on your computer and you know there's things on your computer that distract you, figure out how to prevent yourself from using those tabs. Like maybe if you're a student and you keep getting distracted by YouTube on the computer, sign outta YouTube so you're not tempted to open a tab and like, boom, it's right there. Or go incognito. Make it difficult for yourself. Or if you're like, oh, the password is saved, change the dang password just for this intense work session. Or just until you meet this deadline. Like, there are so many things that we can do to set ourselves up for success to reduce the distractions, but like people don't do them and then they complain that they're stressed and overwhelmed and can't focus blows my mind. What drives me bananas is when I see people saying how hard it is to get stuff done, and they have so much work. It is so hard, and they're so stressed, but they're doing nothing to prevent the distractions. Like internal distractions are hard enough, especially if you're someone who has a DHD, right? Like you have enough to deal with inside your own head. We've got to get these external distraction sources away from us. Okay. And final micro tool is prime your physical condition. So if you're sitting down for a two hour work session, I'm like 90. Like I just contradicted myself. I'm like, don't work for more than 90 minutes. Okay? A 90 minute work session. Make sure you're not hungry. Make sure you're not thirsty. Make sure you're not wearing, you know, uncomfortable or itchy clothes, if that bothers you. Make sure you have your earplugs to block out noises if you need to. Make sure you're physically the right temperature. Not too hot, not too cold, whatever. Again, this is basic stuff, but sometimes we forget to do the basic stuff and it can be helpful to be reminded of the basic stuff. It happens to me all the time. I sit down to do work and I'm like, wait, I'm starving, and then I have to spend 10 minutes eating something and I'm no longer feeling the motivation to do the work. We know the importance of priming ourselves in other contexts. Like if we're gonna get on an airplane, we make sure we have everything we need. If we are going out for a run, we dress and we eat appropriately. If we're going to the beach, we pack our bags with everything that we need, and we need to take the same care and consideration to our work and our study sessions too, especially if we're dealing with a tight deadline and we're trying not to lose our minds. Alright, my friends, that's really it. Part one is about facing the reality of what you have to do and when you're gonna do it, and figuring out if it's even feasible in the first place. So it was get clarity on your deliverable, get clarity on your time, and then make adjustments if you need to. Part two was all about taking the action, doing the work. Execution. So the first strategy of part two, so technically step four of the whole thing, whatever, was to set up and start immediately. This is combined into one step so that we can contain the procrast a planning tendency. Step five or step two in part two was to work in contained chunks, using the time that you identified and trying to specify to the best that you can, what you're gonna be doing in each chunk of time before you sit down to do it. And then step six was all the micro strategies to help you lock in Singletasking, work sprints, telling people that you're unavailable, putting your phone away, setting up your physical environment, internal and external, to support your optimal performance. And I know some of you listening to this episode may have been hoping for some magic strategy that just decreased the amount of work that you had to do or increase the amount of time that you had available. But that is not how these things work. The only way something gets done is if you do it. And ideally we do these things over an extended period of time so it doesn't feel urgent and scary and stressful and dramatic. But you know, life happens and sometimes these deadlines come up outta nowhere, or again, maybe due to some mismanagement on our own, no judgment. But even in these cases, the only strategy to get this stuff done is to do the thing. There's no magic here. There's no, hack, there's just action. And I think everyone listening is honestly smart enough to know that, again, that the only way to get something done that you have to do is to do it. All right? Hopefully, these strategies reminded you of the basics of the importance of just taking a little time to prepare by facing reality, and then sitting down and doing the dang thing. I appreciate each and every one of you. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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