Meeting your writing deadlines is critical. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing for a client or just looking to meet your own goals. You need to be able to have your writing done when you intend to.

How can you meet writing deadlines? Meeting your writing deadlines takes discipline. But you can make it easier on yourself by making proper use of planning and scheduling. As well as eliminating procrastination and figuring out a routine that works best for you.

In this article, I’ll explain some strategies that I use to ensure that I’m consistently meeting my writing deadlines.

Why Is Meeting Writing Deadlines Important?

Not meeting writing deadlines can cause huge problems for you.

Clients probably won’t want to work with you again if you turn in work late. Maybe they can let it go once. But if it’s a consistent problem, they’ll likely look for another writer. They have deadlines of their own that they need to meet.

Even if you’re self-publishing or doing anything that isn’t for a client, meeting deadlines is still important. If you take pre-orders on Amazon for a book and don’t meet your release date, you can lose the ability to take pre-orders again for a YEAR!

So many writers can’t seem to meet deadlines. So just by being able to get your writing done on time, you’ll already really set yourself apart.

Plan It Out

Planning is important whether you’re just writing one blog post or dealing with a much larger project.

Do your research in advance and have everything already planned out. That way when it’s time to sit down and write, you can focus on just writing. All of the preparation work has already been done in advance.

Make A Schedule

Set aside specific time when you plan to write. Be reasonable about it. If you have a full-time job, don’t expect that you’ll be able to write for 6 hours a day afterward.

For bigger projects, it’s good to look at your overall word count that you’ll need to complete. Then figure out how many words you’ll need to complete each day to reach that goal.

Learn Not To Procrastinate?

Easier said than done, right?

Really, this is an entire topic in itself. Rather than re-hashing everything, you should go check out my article called Time Management and Productivity Hacks For Freelance Writers. It will give you a lot of great information on avoiding procrastination.

Don’t Be A Perfectionist

It’s okay to have high standards for yourself and your work. But if you’re spending more time critiquing and reading back over your writing than it took to write it, you might want to take a step back.

As hard as you try, your writing will never be absolutely perfect. You’ll still have the odd sentence that sounds a bit awkward. And maybe even some grammar or spelling mistakes that you’ll never catch.

So just focus on getting your work about 80% of the way there and get it out the door.

Figure Out How You Work Best

Different people have different writing habits and preferences.

Sometimes like to write in shorter sprints where they write for 15 or 20 minutes at a time before taking a short break. Others prefer larger blocks of uninterrupted time so they can really get themselves into the zone.

Personally, I find myself actually using both approaches depending on what I’m writing and what my goals are.

That’s just one example of two different ways you could write. Try to optimize your writing setup and routine based on what you find produces the most high-quality writing for you. Both in terms of quantity and also quality.

Chunk It Into Mini Goals

If you’re writing a novel, or 30 blog posts, or any other big project, it can be easy to get discouraged at the beginning.

It can really feel like an insurmountable task.

So don’t look at it as one big thing. Break your novel down into chapters, and look at each blog individually. Or for longer blog posts, you can even break it down into subheadings. And you can tell yourself that you’ll get 3 out of 5 subheadings done before lunch, or something like that.

Conclusion

Meeting writing deadlines is critical, especially if you’re writing for clients. But even if you’re just writing for yourself, setting deadlines will allow you to put out more writing every week, month, and year.

Planning, scheduling, eliminating procrastination, and figuring out a routine that works for you will all help you in your quest to meet your writing deadlines.