Project Management : How to avoid anxiety and stress of deadlines?

IT Project Managers often find themselves in a situation where they are questioned on the "timely" completion of tasks/ activities. There is always pressure to meet deadlines of deliverables. These are times when as a Project Manager you run after your team to make sure that the task is completed on time and the deadline is not missed. We all know that there are issues, risks and dependencies which make the situation even worse and as a Project Manager you end up being under stress/ anxiety. So is there anything that you can do as a Project Manager to avoid this stress/ anxiety? Answer is Yes, you can. All you need to do is build your project management cushion or buffer. Is this a guaranteed fix? No, it is not, but if executed with care it will give you a lot of comfort. Here is what you need to do...

- Build you project management cushion during the early stages of the project life cycle.
- This cushion/ buffer is the buffer time and the buffer resources that you need to build in your project plan.This is in reality your built in contingency.
- How to include it in your project plan? Lets understand with an example:
For a given technical task, your technical lead comes up to you with efforts of x days and a target delivery date of mm/dd. All you need to do is consider it as x+1 days and target delivery of mm/dd+1.
So when you communicate to the external stakeholders your delivery date is mm/dd+1 but internally your team still needs to meet the delivery date of mm/dd. This way you have 1 additional day which is your project management cushion or buffer. Please note, this is just an example and in real life scenario it may not be as straight forward as x days +1, it will actually be more complex.
- The most important point here is that your team still needs to meet the original timeline but you have added an additional cushion/ buffer as contingency.

If this contingency buffer is used with caution and care it will help you reduce a major chunk of you stress and anxiety when the project moves closer to the deadline. You will get sufficient time to handle any last minute issues.