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When I was a young adult, and dabbling in college while working, a close friend came home one evening and said she was blowing off a college paper that was due the next day. No you’re not, I said, and I insisted that she write it while I typed it (yes, this was before personal computers). Page by page, as she finished writing I snatched it from her hands and edited as I typed. We finished early in the morning. She got a C, which is still much better than an F.

Last week something similar happened again, although it was a completely different goal under very different circumstances and it involved a number of other people. Collectively, we snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with literally only minutes to spare. It’s a software development project and we were demonstrating the system to two groups of librarians the next day. “Almost but not quite” simply would not cut it. We had to have something worth demonstrating, and in the end, we did. But it got me to thinking about what it takes to pull off a victory when the prospects appear bleak.

So here is my best advice on how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, whether it is developing software or merely getting an assignment done at the last minute. I’m not so arrogant as to imagine I can do all of these things, or even have, in any given situation, but if you do even part of them you may be in good shape in the end.

Focus on what’s important. At crunch time you will need to focus your energies on only those activities that will have the greatest impact on your goals, or that are achievable. Not everything will be worth your time and attention, and you will need to choose wisely. Make sure your team is aware of your priorities, and where to spend their time. Give them your permission to ignore or postpone those issues that you feel are less important or outside of what you can achieve within the given timeframe.

Make quick decisions. In crunch time you will not have the luxury to examine decisions from every angle. You will need to make snap judgments and commit the team to a direction almost immediately. You will not have the luxury of deeply investigating options. As a whitewater river guide I got a great deal of training in this. Although you would plan your route through major rapids, things often did not go exactly as planned. You had to be ready and able to make split-second changes to your plans.

Once when running a major rapid in the Grand Canyon, where the waves are sometimes larger than your boat, I hit a wave that spun me sideways. Hitting the next wave sideways would have flipped the boat over. So rather that try to fight the momentum and bring the boat around straight again, I used the momentum to my advantage and continued the spin until I hit the next wave exactly backwards. I rowed the rest of the rapid that way, craning my head around to make sure I hit each wave exactly stern first. There was no time to weigh options, there was only time to act.

I had learned this the hard way. While rafting the Stanislaus River in California as a freshly-minted river guide, I got an object lesson in snap decision-making. On that section of the Stanislaus (now tragically flooded by the New Melones Reservoir), there was a rapid we called “Widowmaker”. All of the river funneled directly into a large boulder in the center. Most of the water split left, but some water went right into a passageway that was just wider than our boats. Running the right passageway was somewhat difficult but totally cool, so we river guides loved going that way. But having enough water in the channel was critical, so judging the level of the river was important, and not always easy to do when approaching the rapid.

What was necessary was split-second decision-making on which path to take. One day not long after I was trained I hesitated, and my boat ended up wrapped around the rock. It took hours to rig ropes to pull it off, and my passengers had to swim from the rock to shore. I never forgot that lesson, since that day it didn’t matter in the least which way I went – I simply had to decide.

Give it all you’ve got. There are two kinds of people – those who can give a task everything they have in them and those who cannot. I think this is a learned behavior, but it is likely learned early, so I don’t know whether adults have much chance of changing their ways on this. This manifests itself in a number of ways. My father, who coached little league baseball, would talk about hustle. You didn’t saunter out to your position in the field, you hustled. You ran out there like you meant it. You showed the other team that you were there to win, and that you had the get up and go to do it.

This early lesson has served me well in so much I have faced in life, from working my way through college, to river guiding, to fathering twins, when I can remember being too exhausted to cry. There are times when a goal you have set will require everything you can give it. You would do well to know whether you are the kind of person who can come through in the clutch.

Plan what you can. You can often see clutch situations coming. You may notice your schedule slipping, or unanticipated problems cropping up. Realize that your initial plan will need to adjusted as you go to incorporate new information. You may need to put-off a planned enhancement or refocus the efforts of your team. But having a plan to adjust can provide you with a useful foundation, even when you need to toss most of it out in order to meet your most important goal.

Don’t overlook, however, that plans can get in your way in a clutch situation as much as they can help. Blind adherence to an original plan when disaster looms is almost a guarantee of failure. You must be willing and able to jettison a plan completely if required, and create a new one quickly from scratch.

Arrange for backup on critical tasks. Often you will find with a team that only one person knows how to do something, or has the appropriate system permissions or institutional authority. In any of these cases, it is a good idea to know what you can do if that person becomes unavailable or incapacitated. Try to minimize your reliance on one individual to perform key tasks.

Communicate well and often. If there is a team involved, make sure they know the plan, and know who to go to if something goes wrong. If there are dependencies, make sure that each piece of the chain knows what they need to know to be effective. Keep the team apprised of any change in plans.

Roll with the punches. No matter how well you plan, things can change dramatically at the last minute. That isn’t the time to panic, but to quickly assess options and act. When that wave turned my boat around in the Canyon, I had to either go with the momentum or face disaster. Your ability to deal with unforeseen circumstances in a positive way will sometimes be the exact difference between disaster and victory.