At work, and in life generally, always cultivate a reputation as a Man of His Word. In other words, when you say you’re going to do something, you do it. Always.
This may present a problem when dealing with work. If someone asks (or tells) you to do some work and you agree to a deadline what happens if you then can’t meet that delivery date?
So always set expectations. The basic principle is to over-deliver. So: if you think you can get that report to someone by Tuesday, tell them you will have it on their desk by Wednesday. If you think a project will take 6 months to deliver, tell the project board it will be done in 7. Then, in both cases, if you complete the work earlier than promised you’ve got some brownie points.
A good tactic is to give out a ‘sweetner’ if you know you can’t meet someone’s initial expectations. For example, if someone wants a summary within 2 days but you know from your priorities and workload that you can only deliver it within 3 days you could
tell them you will get to them within 4 days.
Offer to send them an outline of the summary, perhaps just the salient or crucial points, by the end of the first day. This will get them off your back and inspire confidence in them that you care about their work.
If time is tight it need only be a few lines in an email, sent to the requesting person to summarise the content of your discusson. For example:
Work package:
Objectives: a, b, c
Delivered to: x
Created by : y
Due date: dd/m/yy
Sometimes even something as simple as this shows that you are taking someone seriously and they will cut you a lot more slack. You're not over-committing to anything either.
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