How To Manage Competing Deadlines, Priorities, & Stay Sane

Picture it. You’re enjoying a Sunday evening. Then, a familiar fear creeps into the pit of your stomach... Try as you might to enjoy the dwindling weekend, there’s that little niggle. Looming deadlines, perhaps. Maybe an overly packed schedule, or competing projects. Either way, they’re all vying for your attention which doesn’t make for a good night’s sleep or a productive Monday.

So, whether you’re a project manager who wants to navigate that packed schedule while allocating your teams’ energy accordingly, or an overloaded person trying to organize your work/life balance, behold our top tips to manage all those conflicting priorities.

In this blog post, we will:

• Define priorities (when everything on the list is a priority)
• Outline why effective prioritization is so important
• Provide strategies to help you to navigate the conflicting priorities

What are deadlines and competing priorities?

Simply put, the definition of deadlines differs in every industry. Having worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades, I know the importance of deadlines. When your editor gives you a deadline for print, that’s it – there are no extensions.

The resulting stress can be both debilitating and exhilarating in equal measure. Either you crumble under the pressure or you use it for fuel.

Take my Monday ritual for instance:

• Pitch a flurry of articles by 10am.
• By midday, my editor would tell me which story she wanted.
• At 4pm, I would send over a fully researched, written, edited, and fact-checked 1,800-word article (with quotes from reliable sources) in order for it to make it into the paper the following day.

For anyone thinking “Meh, that sounds doable”, I also had to factor in two school pick-ups between 1pm and 2pm and keep those infants alive until their father got home 😕

In short, I know all about juggling conflicting demands – while trying to stay sane in the process. Granted, all deadlines differ in time, scope, and scale, but the ethos behind managing priorities is pretty universal.

For example, in a company setting, competing priorities arise when team goals clash or deadlines overlap, causing a strain on resources. These conflicting demands can seem challenging, particularly when they involve different departments and/or stakeholders. For instance, trying to align the priorities of the Business Development and legal departments can seem almost impossible.

The importance of managing competing deadlines and priorities

A clear system for handling competing priorities is paramount. It keeps your team and stakeholders informed, aligned, while having faith in the project's direction.

Behold the benefits of keeping abreast of competing priorities:

Now that we’ve established why it’s important to keep abreast of conflicting priorities, let’s get into actionable strategies.

Strategies to manage clashing deadlines and priorities

Below are five proven ways to mitigate multiple deadlines and conflicting priorities. While some might seem obvious, they bear repeating.

1. Leverage task management software, integrating it into your existing workflow.
2. Implement a priority ranking system – funneling them into ‘Urgent’ (should have been done already), ‘High’ (require your attention imminently), ‘Normal’ (important, so let them own a portion of your day-to-day), ‘Low’ categories (not immediately required/don’t take long to do).
3. Visually map out your priorities by using flowcharts. Having this visual reference will be key when guiding you through the process plus identifying any potential bottlenecks along the way.
4. Employ a Prioritization Matrix (which, fun fact, dates back to President Dwight Eisenhower. He devised it to mitigate the myriad of urgent issues he faced as a US Army general). This framework uses ‘impact’ and ‘effort’ at its axes to rank tasks. You can score each color-coded factor as low (green), medium (orange), or high (red).
5. Make a Master Task list using The Kanban method, where team members focus on finishing current tasks before tackling new ones.

6 ways to successfully navigate competing deadlines

When you have multiple deadlines hurtling towards you, it’s all too easy to get submerged in the details. Therefore, it’s important to be honest with yourself and others – you can’t ostrich yourself out of impending conflicting deadlines.

Here are six ways to keep your head up and keep your competing deadlines on track.

1. Know your golden hour

Determine when you work most efficiently. For instance, is it very early in the morning? Or, perhaps it’s at night? Once you ascertain when your golden hour is, ensure you set yourself realistic goals to meet within this time of peak productivity. Be it time chunking or another time management technique, there’s an array of analog and/or more tech-orientated options outlined here.