Today’s work management is all about time management. Time is a valuable resource in doing quality work and despite our best intentions, we end up sabotaging our own time management without even realising it. Though we complain about not having enough time, yet, we fail to use the time we do have wisely.
We are all familiar of the feeling of how work projects get overstretched inspite of proper planning, and how certain tasks that we were once so convinced we had so much time to tackle now remain unfinished or go beyond our schedule. In short, many of us are kind of bad when it comes to managing time wisely.
“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.” — Brian Tracy
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So, what causes poor time-management
Often, it seems that no matter how many to-do lists we write, no matter how organised we get, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything we want. The problem of poor time management however isn’t always about that you didn’t work hard enough. It is mostly have got to do with how our brains are hardwired to sabotage our productivity.
When faced with a trade-off, we always end up choosing the option that most satisfies our immediate impulse over an important task/work. Our mental traps or cognitive biases impact the way we spend our time, prioritise, and how we go about achieving our goals. These are the processes of the mind, which in everyday life encourage you to act in a habitual way. The result is a loss of time, distorted choices, and less prioritised outcomes. This is the reason why inspite of having convinced yourself to do everything you set out to do, yet you find yourself within a stack of unfinished or shallow work.
More often, many of us simply underestimate how long our work will take, overcommit, or be unrealistic about what we can do with our available time. And the way we approach our time can make it feel like we just need more. Poor time management thus manifests itself when we give into these mental traps.
Mental traps that sabotage your time management.
To control our time effectively, we need to understand which biases influence us to get into these unhelpful working habits. Here are some mental traps that lead to poor time-management.
How you decide what to prioritise.
The mere urgency effect. This is when you are biased towards prioritising work that’s urgent over work that is truly important, yet not time-sensitive. We prioritise urgent tasks because the effects of not dealing with them are instant. That is, we prioritise tasks we perceive as time-sensitive over those that aren’t, even when the rewards of the non-time sensitive tasks are objectively great.
We will always choose urgency over important every time. This bias clearly explains why, despite our best intentions we give into our short term impulses and put off most important goals until tomorrow. People who perceive themselves as generally busy are the ones who are even more likely to fall victim to this bias.
“The essence of self-discipline is to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing.”
Barry Werner
To overcome this is to have the ability to what’s important over what’s urgent. There are always tasks that need you to deal with right now. It ‘s hard to know how to prioritise, especially when you are facing seemingly urgent tasks or dealing with multiple tasks/projects simultaneously or when your schedules might overflow with all kinds of tasks and activities. As a result, you may have to go for most pressing over that which is important. Prioritising at times might be difficult, however, you can make things easier with certain online tools that are available to help you prioritise effectively. For instance, Action Priority Matrix from MindTools.com which will help you determine if a task is high-yield and high-priority.
Set aside your more productive hours each day for your most important work. Block that time off on your calendar so you can focus without interruptions. Set aside specific time blocks for digital tasks like replying emails or checking messages or social media notifications. You can use time-tracking software to your work routine to help you stay on track. Use an app blocker like Freedom or an inbox management tool like Mailman to organise your working hours.
How you estimate the amount of time required for a task.
(The Planning fallacy) The tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task despite knowing similar tasks have taken longer in the past. Many of us underestimate how long our work will take. I am not sure how applicable it is to you, but I always end up underestimating the amount of time I’ll need to complete my writing. We just seem to convince ourselves that this time it’ll be different. And so we set an unrealistic deadline, hoping for better outcomes, but find ourselves in the same pattern once again. This is the reason for missing deadlines. Not having accurate understanding of how much work and time would be required at the start.
Ineffectively scheduling your tasks, not being aware of your peak performance hours can even come at the expense of your personal life. To overcome this is to find your most productive work hours and scheduling your high-value work during those hours. Similarly, you can push your low-energy work during your down time.
Many times, our time estimates go wrong depending on the difficulty of the task or based on the required resources, or sometimes because it might seem too large or overwhelming to even to start with. However, everything can be unpacked into smaller, less daunting tasks. The more granular you can be in your planning, the more realistic your time estimates tend to be.
Another way to overcome this bias is to pad your schedules more than you think you need to. As you are planning your week, pretend twenty percent of your time isn’t available to you. More likely than not, the work you plan for most percentage of your time will end up spilling over into your next work hours. Get a realistic view of time it takes for you to complete things instead of convincing yourself into thinking you’ll be able to complete it faster next time. Use a time tracking tool like Toggl or Todoist to track time and to organise work better.
Remembering unfinished tasks more than completed ones.
(The Zeigarnik effect) This tendency to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than completed ones might seem a useful one to begin with. It’s good to think of things we need to do, and it’s a positive thing to finish things we start. But, it can make it difficult to switch off or to focus on other tasks if you ever happen to get interrupted in the middle of your tasks. It takes up your attention, splitting your focus and makes it harder to concentrate on whatever you are currently working on.
Research shows that people who were interrupted during a task showed low performance rates on a subsequent task than those who were allowed to complete the first task before starting the second one. This inability to mentally disconnect with your unfinished tasks in your hours away from work might impact your personal life—weekends, vacations, family time or sleep time.
However, there are ways to overcome this bias to boost your time management. You don’t have to actually complete all of your tasks in order to feel relieved. A simple thing like making a plan to finish your incomplete tasks and writing them down can come in handy to move past this bias. Creating rituals for planning your day and week ahead help you work on the right things at the right time. Make a plan for tomorrow before you end the work day so your unfinished tasks don’t take up your other work hours.
Choosing immediate reward over a larger reward in the future.
( The present bias)Those of us who procrastinate are prone to this bias. It seems quite natural to go for things that have immediate reward over something larger in the long-term. The present bias leads us to consistently optimise our current situation, forever putting off the harder things that set our future selves up for success. When we fail to work on our important goals, we are setting ourselves up for failure in future.
Find ways to make the right thing more rewarding. For instance, if you find yourself procrastinating on your morning routine, seek out a form of exercise routine that you actually enjoy. If you find yourself scrolling social media instead of focusing on your work, lock yourself out of your social media apps at certain times of the day. Reframe how you think about rewards. Focus on the feeling of satisfaction you get after working on your sub goals instead of the big larger goal that often seems daunting. Imagining your successful future self helps you procrastinate less and focus on utilising your time more wisely.
Read more: How to reach your long-term goals
“A plan is what, a schedule is when. It takes both a plan and a schedule to get things done.”
Peter Turla
Choosing complex over simple
(The complexity bias)This is the tendency to prefer busy schedules over simple ones. We often get drawn to the view that keeping ourselves busy as an accomplishment. Having your to-do lists full of brim might help you show off to display your productivity and motivation. However, overloading your schedules can actually be making it more complex when getting things done instead of simply working on your most important tasks first. An other key factor is constant switching between different tasks or subject matter limits the amount of focus we are able to give each task. When our attention gets fragmented, it builds up attention residue, which impacts productivity negatively.
Complexity can keep life interesting. But they are more difficult to maintain it overtime and lead to poor time-management. The perception of complexity often leads to avoidance. When we think something is difficult to do or understand, we tend not to try. Overloaded schedules make you less productive and lead to burnout by trying to do much. Make sure you are including time for proper breaks as needed. Similarly, when it comes to being biased to complexity, take an iterative approach to your tasks. Try things. See how they work and slowly improve over time. Choose a system or a ritual that you are more likely to stick with and that which aligns with your natural inclinations.
Other time wasting mental traps to avoid:
Trap of ‘procrastination’.
This is another common way in which we sabotage our time-management. The habit of putting off important tasks can rob you of your time. We delay difficult tasks for later thinking we are saving time completing unfinished work in other areas. There could be other reasons behind procrastinating — the task might be boring, too big to handle, overwhelming or something that doesn’t match up with your skills. Slacking, delaying, putting off, doing unimportant tasks becomes a kind of vicious cycle unless you break it.
- If the task is too big, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks. Keep your lists manageable, measurable, and meaningful can help you procrastinate less.
- Work on building your skills everyday a little to make your task challenging enough.
- Remind yourself of the purpose and meaning of the task to keep yourself motivated if boredom is the reason.
- Instead of always aiming for perfection, start working on your difficult tasks by just getting started.
Trap of ‘believing only you can do a task.’
Many of us find it hard to relinquish control of our own work, believing that if we don’t work on a particular task, the quality will suffer. This is another way we tend to sabotage our time. However, taking a step back, and assigning responsibility for a task to other skilled individuals, you can focus on something more important that requires your expertise. No matter how talented you might be there can never be enough time in the day to look after every small thing.
Learn to delegate work to the right people who you know will deliver to the best of their abilities. Letting the person know about your expectations and keeping a check on how efficiently they are accomplishing the task. As author John C. Maxwell says, “If something can be done 80% as well by someone else, delegate! “ Taking the time to delegate and setting up systems and processes to train someone else gives you more time in the future.
The ‘technology trap’.
Digital technology is great if used in a way that will benefit your goals and objectives. On the other hand if not used properly, it can sabotage your time and keep you into the habit of ongoing procrastination. According to research, on average, one is likely to check mail and chat every 6minutes or less. Use apps and tools and switch between different social media platforms, spend up to 5 hours on their phone—watch videos, forwards, unnecessary tweeting or messaging. Multitask for at least 40% of their day.
Our digital habits sabotage most of our time probably more than anything else. Sometimes even the basics like phone, to-do list, notes too can become distractions and reduce your cognitive capacity. Digital clutter in your work environment competes for your attention and results in decreased performance and increased stress. In other words, how you use your apps and tools can bring value or be a frustrating distraction. To simplify and to strike a balance, know that you have a choice and use you intention to go with those that optimise your work. Carefully select and optimise those that strongly support your goals.
The trap of ’busyness’
Many of us find ourselves sucked into a lifestyle of busyness, over-consumption and more. Research has shown that many workers spend 80% of their day answering emails, in meetings , or on calls. Many of our daily workplace activities like communication, collaboration, meetings, calls, mails, and messages might make us seem busy. And for many of us there’s a comfort in such artificial ‘busyness’, while actual work demands that you leave much of that behind. Such busyness becomes proxy to your efforts in doing productive work and in most situations wastes your time. Not all of your such activities result in quality work.
To overcome busyness trap, consider asking yourself whether the activities you are indulging yourself into make any difference to your end goals that are important to you. Prioritise the vital few and say ‘no’ to trivial many. Schedule your tasks with desired outcome in mind to come up with goal-relevant activities.
Questions for self-reflection
What are some of the ways in which you sabotage your time management?
How do these mental traps end up sabotaging your time?
What are some of your strategies to overcome these biases of time management?
What impact does your time management has on your short and long-term goals?
Are you aware of your peak productivity hours? And how do you put it to best use?
In what ways do you make an effort to organise your most work flow days?
How often are you pressurised by lack of time for your most important tasks or goals?
How do you rate your digital habits- from complex to simple, between 1-10?
To conclude,
Time is the most precious resource. And while we can’t control its movement, we can make sure we get the most out of the time we do have. As Von Goethe says, “you’ll always have enough time to do the things you want,” if you choose to spend your time on those tasks. Becoming aware of biases and mental traps that sabotage your time management lets you get the maximum of your work hours. Manage your time effectively using above strategies to prioritise your most important tasks, block out external distractions, and optimising your daily schedule to do the right work at right time.
“It’s surprising how much free time and productivity you gain when you lose the busyness in your mind.”
Brittany Burgunder
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