Have you ever been in the middle of a project only to realize – perhaps too late – that you’ve seriously underestimated how long it will take? How about putting a priority task on hold for something you’d prefer to work on and only remembering it once the deadline is looming?
We’ve all been there before. We’re given a month’s heads-up and we still only get started the day before.
Why do we get into these messes?
The main culprit is poor time management.
It’s so easy to view this as a personal failure. It feels like you should be able to overcome it with better tools and self-control. But improving time management isn’t just a case of picking a productivity strategy and sticking with it.
There are some deeper causes of poor time management that you need to account for if you want to make a sustainable change.
The High Cost of Poor Time Management
The impact of poor time management on productivity isn’t hard to spot. It often means not being able to spend adequate time on the most important tasks.
Mismanaging time leads to rushing, missing deadlines, and potentially delivering subpar work. It compromises workplace effectiveness and could negatively impact the organization. But the problems don’t stop there.
Poor time management has knock-on consequences for others, too. It can delay and compromise collaborative work and put a strain on relationships.
Then there’s the impact on your own wellbeing. The pressure of constantly feeling strapped for time can lead to stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and, ultimately, burnout.
What Causes Poor Time Management?
It’s tempting to blame poor time management on a lack of knowledge or willpower. But there are also sound psychological and environmental reasons for why we struggle when it comes to scheduling and prioritization.
Here are 5 key factors at play and strategies for tackling them.
The Planning Fallacy
We tend to be overly optimistic about how long a task will take. This is known as the “planning fallacy”.
Part of the problem is that the perceived distance between “now” and “then” makes us think in more abstract terms, rather than accounting for each part of the task in detail. That’s why the effects of the fallacy get worse the further into the future we’re planning for.
Our brains may also struggle to learn from previous experiences. When planning, we’re likely to focus on what makes a project different, subconsciously dismissing previous experiences as irrelevant.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that it’s impossible to predict external factors, like sickness or delays caused by other people.
Solutions:
- Write down estimates of how long you think tasks should take and then revisit once the task has been completed. Note obstacles and aspects that took more or less time than expected. This is a great exercise to train yourself to make more accurate plans.
- Always include some buffer time. It’s much better to be cautious with estimates.
If There’s Time, We Take It
A study found that when a future task was taken away, people chose to spend the additional time completing the current task, rather than finishing early. This is Parkinson’s Law in action: we’re prone to take all the time available to complete a task, regardless of whether or not we need to.
There are many reasons for this, ranging from procrastination to scope creep (where we spend additional time on aspects that weren’t part of the original plan).
And then there’s perfectionism. Who hasn’t felt the temptation to spend a bit longer tweaking something to try to get it just right?
Solutions:
- Develop strategies for overcoming unhelpful procrastination so you can start promptly, even when it’s heavy going.
- Set clear specs (or briefs), goals, milestones, and expectations, to cut down on scope creep. If it wasn’t in your original plan, think hard about whether it’s truly needed.
- Speaking about taming perfectionism, Matt Plummer recommends creating a checklist you can follow to give yourself a sense of closure.
Overwhelming Urgency
If you’ve ever intended to spend the day making progress on a project and found your time completely taken up with emails instead, you can blame a cognitive bias called “The Mere Urgency Effect”. We prioritize things that feel pressing over less time-sensitive tasks that are more important simply because of perceived urgency.
This can get even worse when we’re under stress due to a phenomenon known as “cognitive tunnelling”. Here, our focus narrows, causing us to fixate on whatever is right in front of us, rather than thinking about the bigger picture.
Solutions:
- Get clear on what your main goals and priorities are, as an individual and as a team. That way, you’ll be able to properly judge the impact of tasks.
- When a new task or request comes in, take a moment to establish whether it is genuinely time-sensitive (or whether it just feels like it is). If it is, think about how important it is compared to the other things you’re doing. Tools like the Eisenhower Matrix can help.
You Can’t Say No
You might also find you struggle with time management because you can’t say no to requests.
The reasons for this can be emotional. Some might feel passionate about helping people out while others may worry about what saying no will do to their reputation.
Another key reason is we convince ourselves we’ll be less busy by the time we need to honor the request. But as behavioral scientist Professor Anuj Shah tells the BBC: “In six months, that week is going to look a lot like this week (…) We need to realize that slack in the future is an illusion.”
Solutions:
- Take a transactional approach, rather than an emotional one. Acknowledge that you can’t just add this on top of everything else. Is there another commitment you can move or sacrifice to make space for this one? Can you justify it?
- You can also try to head people off. In his book Slow Productivity, Cal Newport recommends creating public versions of your to-do list so that people can see what you’re already committed to.
Environmental Factors
The modern workplace often doesn’t empower us to be effective managers of our time. As well as unrealistic expectations, there are also structural and systematic problems to contend with.
78% of respondents to a survey said they’re expected to attend so many meetings that they struggle to get their work done. And more often than not, there’s no stated goal or agenda to keep things on track.
Then there are the distracting interruptions from Slack and email notifications, constantly derailing everyone’s focus and creating a crippling sense of urgency.
Asana’s Anatomy of Work report found that people spend 60% of their time on coordination tasks like responding to messages or searching for information, leaving only 27% for skilled work and 13% for strategic planning.
Managers feel unable to protect their team from these unproductive time sinks, with respondents to Reclaim AI’s Task Management Trends Report scoring themselves just 5 out of 10 on average.
Solutions:
- Before meetings, ask what the objective is and whether there’s an agenda. This gives you time to prepare and helps everyone to keep the conversation on-topic.
- Work on improving your focus so that even the most distracting interruptions will roll off with ease.
- Agree with your team on a set time each day or week for focused work without internal interruptions.
- Think about how you can streamline the feedback process to cut down on coordination time.
Solving Poor Time Management: Manage the Causes, Manage Your Time
There are many psychological and environmental factors that can cause poor time management. Don’t be too hard on yourself – it’s more than just a lack of willpower!
To make better use of your time, focus on developing techniques to help keep those external factors in check, too. By doing so, you’ll boost your productivity, safeguard your wellbeing, and make yourself a better teammate.
