Against the Clock: 9 Strategies That Helped Me Manage My Time, Energy, and Focus Ahead of the Single Biggest Deadline of My Creative Life
When we’re up against a big deadline, how can we keep burnout away and our lives in balance?
Recently, I worked through the biggest creative deadline of my professional career.
For over two years, I’ve been shepherding a massive, multidisciplinary building project from conceptual design through construction documents.
It’s complex.
It’s massive.
It’s a lot.
This was the final push to end the design phase.
And my team needed to hit our deadline no matter what.
9 Strategies to Minimize Deadline Burnout
Whether you’re in the driver's seat, or a team member along for the ride, a deadline like this can be a stressful journey.
Simply put, the last six weeks have felt like a chaotic sprint to the finish.
• Helping coordinate last-minute design choices.
• Reviewing the documents for quality control.
• Supporting my team’s efforts.
• Putting out fires.
• Pushing send.
I’ve been talking about work/life balance for a few years now. And if ever I needed a test to confirm my strategies would help me keep burnout away, this was it.
Today, I wanted to recap the nine strategies I used to maintain my work/life balance ahead of my own deadline so you can do the same for yours in the future.
I’ve grouped them into three major categories:
Time, Energy, and Focus.
If you master them all, I can't promise you'll hit your deadline—that's still up to you. But I can promise you'll be far less likely to burn out in the process.
Before we dive in, here are the nine strategies.
Time
Set mini-deadlines
Remove the fluff
Leave room for fire
Energy
Set clear boundaries
Maintain wellness
Take breaks
Focus
Communicate expectations
Delegate and disappear
Keep the necessary
How to Manage Your Time Against a Deadline
Time Management is how we set our plan.
Strategy 1 — Set Mini-Deadlines
Set hard (but different) deadlines for big and small stuff.
There’s the big deadline you’re working against. But that’s not the only deadline. At least, it shouldn’t be.
Other things to set deadlines for:
Completing a first draft
Reviewing your work (or others’ work)
Completing revisions from review markups
Completing a portion of the work (ie. drawing sheet, chapter, etc.)
Sending background drawings and other info to the rest of your team
Having mini-deadlines scheduled out and mixed into the larger schedule will help you realize how much you have left to do and where you are in the process overall.
You don’t do everything all at once. You set smaller milestones, complete them, and move to the next.
Strategy 2 — Remove Fluff
Remove everything you can from your schedule.
If you’re prioritizing a work deadline, that means you have to say “No” or “Later” to a lot of things you might otherwise say “Yes” to now.
That also means going through your calendar and removing (or at least rescheduling) everything you can until after the deadline has passed.
Things that should be targeted for removal from your schedule:
Quick chats / Water cooler conversations
Other projects and respective deadlines
Continuing Ed. (ie. “Lunch and Learns)
Unnecessary meetings
Strategy 3 — Leave Room for Fire
Leave extra room to compensate for the fires and the failures.
Without fail, there will always be something that goes wrong right before the finish line.
Failure is inevitable.
One way I like to mitigate failure is to set different, spaced-out deadlines for the team and the Owner.
I start with the deliverable deadline to the Owner.
After it’s been negotiated, I work backward a minimum of a few days to a week for the final submission from my team to me directly.
The team submits their docs to me, I review them, coordinate or adjust as needed, and assemble the package.
After it’s all set, I make the final submission to the Owner.
I do this for one failure in particular—tardiness.
A consultant or teammate won’t send me their drawings on time. Someone is always late. I have no idea who it will be from project to project, but it always happens. On a project like this with over 12 different disciplines submitting docs to me, the likelihood compounds.
Because I place a buffer between deadlines to review the documents and to assemble the documents together, I reduce the stress I personally feel at the very end of the process.
On a project this size, it literally took me nearly two business days worth of time to make sure everything was in order before the package went out the door.
Not something you want to do in a couple of hours.
—
The other type of failure is the unforeseen one.
On this last go-round, I had every intention of stopping, pushing the button to print, and being done.
That wasn’t in the cards.
Instead, my power went out, my internet went down (I was working from home that day) and I had to adjust.
But because I had enough time built in, I could go to the office the next day (on the weekend) and finish up what I needed to.
Crisis averted—because I built in the time.
You’ll always need the time for things like this.
How to Manage Your Energy Against a Deadline
Energy Management is how we fuel our plan.
Strategy 4 — Set Clear Boundaries
Set clear boundaries between work and home life.
For about 6 weeks up to the final deadline, I really felt it.
In part, that’s because I was managing the project. With all eyes looking at our team and its submission, the pressure was real. I wanted to do a good job for myself, the firm, and the client.
But I also needed to live my life outside of work.
So, I set better boundaries to maintain mental separation between my office and home.
When I left the office, I turned off my laptop and let go of as much of the stress building up in my brain as I could.
I told myself I would address anything work-related at the office during work hours only. This is especially helpful when the ramp-up of stress is a slow burn over several weeks.
Your energy goes toward work during work hours and stays there.
Your energy after hours goes toward maintaining wellness for yourself and your relationships outside of work.
Strategy 5 — Maintain Wellness
Maintain positive sleep, exercise, and eating habits.
Your energy is in a constant state of fluctuation throughout the days and weeks leading up to a deadline.
Your goal—produce as much of it as you can so you don’t run out early.
—
The first part of the equation is sleep.
Without question, give yourself 7 hours minimum of sleep per night. You should strive for 7-8 hours per night anyway, which is especially important ahead of a deadline.
You need your focus to be at its peak against a deadline to stay focused and alert. Sleep is what will give you more starting energy in your daily battery to pull from.
—
Equally important are your exercise habits.
By disconnecting from your creative work and moving your body, you can help your body better regulate blood pressure, heart rate, metabolism, and a myriad of other things to keep your mind functioning at its peak performance.
Even if you don’t have the opportunity to formally go to the gym every day, try to go for a walk (30 min to an hour) and get your body moving.
Creative tasks are often sedentary. And you need to get your body moving more so that you don’t become stagnant.
—
Nutrition is the final piece of the puzzle.
Similar to the logic of eating a good breakfast ahead of a test so your brain functions at its best, you need to maintain good eating habits in the days and weeks ahead of a deadline to do the same.
If you must go out to eat, pick up nutritional / semi-nutritional options that won’t make you feel weighed down. Heavy. junky foods will keep you tired and less likely to return back to full creative power.
Strategy 6 — Take Breaks
Take regularly scheduled breaks to step away.
When I get down to a creative task, I try to focus my energy on one thing at a time. Sometimes I don’t even realize how much time has passed. That flow state is great, but it won’t last forever.
By setting scheduled breaks (every 30-45 minutes or so) to get up, stretch, and get some water or coffee, you let your brain take a moment.
You can come back and set another task for the same amount of time so you don’t burn yourself out.
I have a timer that I typically set on my watch, phone, or digital timer to remind me.
This supports your flow of energy so you don’t burn out.
How to Manage Your Focus Against a Deadline
Focus Management is how we execute our plan.
Strategy 7 — Communicate Expectations
Communicate your expectations and limits clearly.
Whether you’re managing a team or on the team itself, clear communication is the most important tool you have.
Let those around you know what you expect of them and what they can expect of you. Be succinct and clear.
Respect others’ time and energy, but be firm on what you expect from them. You don’t know what other deadlines might be influencing their decisions.
When it comes to your own production, be clear about what you can accomplish.
Don’t overstretch yourself.
Don’t overpromise and under-deliver.
Set expectations fairly, let people know what you plan to get done, and do it.
If something does come up, let others know so they can adjust accordingly to support you.
Strategy 8 — Delegate and Disappear
Delegate what you can. Disappear when possible.
If you’re in a leadership position like I am, you’ll have a bit more discretion over who is in charge of what.
That’s a bit of a double-edged sword sometimes. It means taking players on your team, looking at their experience and skills, and delegating tasks to meet them where they are.
Sometimes you’ll need to give them more feedback than others.
Be fair in what you give them.
Be clear about your expectations and let them come back with something that you can review together.
Once you delegate what you can, disappear.
Find places where you can disconnect, let others get their work done, and then get your work done at the same time.
Distractions are everywhere. But if you trust your team, give them clear instructions, and find places to disconnect, you’ll be far more likely to succeed.
Strategy 9 — Keep the Necessary
Keep the necessities. Let go of the nice-to-haves.
One of the hardest things to gauge in a creative process is what is absolutely, 100% necessary and what are the “nice-to-haves.”
Why?
Because creative processes are inherently organic.
They vary with every project.
So, I try to keep it simple.
On an Architecture project like this, I ask myself, “what are the documents I need at a minimum for a code official to grant a permit and for a contractor to build it?”
Everything else after that is a “nice-to-have.”
There will always be drawings I could make to clarify further.
But I also know there will always be questions during construction that I’m not even considering at the moment.
By focusing on the fundamentals now, filling out some details I think will help everyone now, and then allowing some of the back and forth to happen later, I can better mitigate my own stress levels so that I actually get the project done well and on time.
There’s no such thing as a perfect set of anything, let alone design documents.
Final Thoughts
Deadlines are a necessary evil.
Without deadlines, no one would ever get anything done.
Some are self-imposed. Others are dictated to us. In any creative arena though, we can help mitigate the stress we put ourselves through to achieve those deadlines.
For me, there were 9 strategies that really made a noticeable difference in my own stress levels working up to the greatest deadline of my career to date.
Without tools like these to help mitigate the stress, I would’ve burned out and missed the deadline.
Now that I’m past it, I’ll take some time to reflect and get moving on the next.
Ah, the life of a creative pro.
TL;DR
Creative deadlines are part of the process
Deadlines can dump extra stress onto our lives
There are 9 strategies that can help us manage our time, energy and focus to fight that stress
Communicate expectations
Delegate and disappear
Set clear boundaries
Keep the necessary
Leave room for fire
Set mini-deadlines
Maintain wellness
Remove the fluff
Take breaks
Quote of the Week
Motivation for the days ahead of you.
“I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
— Douglas Adams
That's all for now.
Stay creative, my friends—and have a great week!
