Poll: How do you stay efficient when juggling many small, tight-deadline tasks? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "How do you stay efficient when juggling many small, tight-deadline tasks?".
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Tight deadlines aren't my cup of tea and, in general, I don’t accept this kind of work. Over the years only very exceptional circumstances made me broke this rule. The exception has been my longest-standing customer who sends me small paragraphs to translate almost every other day. We have been working together for so many years that this poses no problem at all…
[Edited at 2025-07-10 10:54 GMT]
| | | | Mario Chávez
United States
Local time: 10:56
Inggris menyang Spanyol
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| Tight deadlines | Jul 10, 2025 |
Shortly after I took my current job as a medical translator, my translator colleague and I realized that the range of time frames in the translation request form had two unworkable options: 72 hours and ASAP. We had them removed. We instituted a first-come, first-served basis for prioritizing requests, and this is within a hospital.
Of course, circumstances will vary, but I don't do rush jobs. I stopped accepting “tight deadline” jobs or unreasonably urgent jobs about 15 years a... See more Shortly after I took my current job as a medical translator, my translator colleague and I realized that the range of time frames in the translation request form had two unworkable options: 72 hours and ASAP. We had them removed. We instituted a first-come, first-served basis for prioritizing requests, and this is within a hospital.
Of course, circumstances will vary, but I don't do rush jobs. I stopped accepting “tight deadline” jobs or unreasonably urgent jobs about 15 years ago. Sure, my client base shrank, but I learned to live with it.
Some of us hold the position that rush jobs are untenable as a regularly occurring feature of our professional lives. After all, even firefighters aren't fighting fires 24/7. These rush jobs are impractical because we adopt a different, less efficient translation strategy: we research less, we write faster but tend to produce so-so prose. In my first years as a translator, when I would accept rush jobs, they represented a single-digit percentage of my overall workload. Conclusion: rush jobs don't pay the bills.
Some of us have adopted not only that pragmatic stand on rush jobs but we bulwark it with our own philosophy of work-life balance, or we don't want rush jobs to steer us from a particular lifestyle or set of priorities. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:56
Member (2014)
Jepang menyang Inggris
| Mise en place is key | Jul 10, 2025 |
You just have to be very organized in your planning and scheduling.
Of course, if you take on more than you can humanly deliver, you're going to fail.
If it is an important deadline - like a regulatory filing - your client will make a mental note of that failure.
Conclusion: be realistic when taking bookings from clients.
Regards,
Dan
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MollyRose
United States
Local time: 09:56
Inggris menyang Spanyol
+ ...
I make sure I have all translation requests on an Excel sheet. I list them by date received, a column in red with due date (would add the time due if necessary), number of documents, number of pages, simple document name(s), requester name, status (translating, reviewing, sent) and date sent to requester. I always look at that before I start my workday. Once I have sent the translation, I change the font on that row to green. That makes it easy to spot the ones that I still need to work on. I us... See more I make sure I have all translation requests on an Excel sheet. I list them by date received, a column in red with due date (would add the time due if necessary), number of documents, number of pages, simple document name(s), requester name, status (translating, reviewing, sent) and date sent to requester. I always look at that before I start my workday. Once I have sent the translation, I change the font on that row to green. That makes it easy to spot the ones that I still need to work on. I used to color code the status when I printed them on paper (using highlighters): pink for translating, orange for reviewing, etc. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Philip Lees
Greece
Local time: 17:56
Yunani menyang Inggris
I would never put myself in that position.
I might take on one job with a tight deadline, if I was certain I could meet it comfortably. But never more than one at the same time, and certainly not "many".
The very question is a contradiction: compare "efficient" with "juggling". But at least this time it has no gross grammatical errors.
| | | | | Those were the days | Jul 11, 2025 |
I wish that were a problem
| | | | Josephine Cassar
Malta
Local time: 16:56
Member (2012)
Inggris menyang Malta
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| Juggling many small, tight-deadline tasks... | Jul 11, 2025 |
I wouldn't accept many small tight-deadline tasks all at once, simple. However, it depends on the 'many' too. If many means 6/8 tasks, it's one thing, if it's 30 or more, it's a completely different story. As a general rule, I don't like tight deadlines though they are inevitable sometimes and I accept them from clients I usually translate for and who don't normally send tasks with tight deadlines.
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