Stevea Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Carrie writes in. I'm a magazine editor. I have trouble enforcing deadlines for contributors, both employee and volunteer.

Surprisingly, the salaried contributors are late more often than the outside contributors.

How can I get everyone to meet their deadlines? It's hard enough to overcome your own procrastination.

How do you help other people overcome theirs? Different things work for different people.

The question required big guns, so I turned to my outside panel

of experts for advice. Melvin is a super nerd. It's all about being very, very clear, Melvin says.

Meeting deadlines are part of someone's job. Deadlines shouldn't be soft and fluffy. They're a fact

of nature, like the fact that new vampires

rise from the crypt three days after being bitten. That means if you want to have a deadline of having

real vampires at your Halloween party on Sunday, you need to make sure they've all been bitten by the

Thursday before. If you wait until Friday, it's simply too late. When you hire someone to do work for you, the deadline is part of

the agreement. So if you work with a bunch of writers, for example, you should check in with them

once a month and just review their on-time performance. Sometimes all that's needed is for them to

become aware of how often they are or aren't meeting their deadlines, and they'll self-correct.

Enforce deadlines by making them public.

Another way to enforce deadlines is to make all of the dates public.

Bernice sends out a weekly newsletter that many other people contribute to.

She's sick of having to manage everyone's deadlines and feels that because the newsletter is a group effort, all deadline information should be public too.

I confess, I've used this myself on projects.

Create a public calendar prominently displayed in the office, showing due dates and actually submitted dates for everyone.

Above the calendar put the on-time goal,

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