Poor Time Management: Signs and Immediate Ways to Tackle it

Imagine it’s the end of your workday. You check your to-do list and realize half of it has yet to be checked off. You get overwhelmed with frustration.

Seriously, what happened? You’ve been chained to your desk since sunrise. Why didn’t you get more accomplished?

The odds are, it’s poor time management – but don’t worry. Research shows that all you need to do is hone these three time-related skills:

• Time-awareness
• Time-arrangement
• Time-adaptation

Let’s unpack these skills and simple time management strategies to master them.

What is poor time management?

How do you know you’re a poor time manager? You have an ineffective utilization of time, characterized by a lack of prioritization, organization, and control over your tasks and responsibilities. That results in decreased productivity with unfinished tasks, missed deadlines, and increased stress levels.

To understand poor time management better, I’ll explain what time management is.

Time management is planning and controlling how much time we spend on different activities. It involves setting realistic goals, prioritizing tasks, and allocating time effectively to achieve your desired outcomes.

It’s about being intentional with your hours and minutes rather than letting them slip away.

Naturally, poor time management is the opposite. It comes with poor performance in managing your time, with time wasted procrastinating at work, scheduling poorly, and not feeling like you have time for things that fill your cup.

Let’s now shine a spotlight on the red flags that scream “poor time management skills.”

Remember, recognizing these signs is the first step toward a positive change. Don’t beat yourself up. According to research done by Salary.com, 89% of employees admit to wasting time at work every day.

Here are some of the signs of poor time management:

• Chronic lateness: You constantly rush and apologize for being late at work, either in calls or missing deadlines. If these behaviors are consistent, there are surefire signs that your time allocation is ineffective.
• Feeling overwhelmed: You’re constantly stressed about your workload and don’t know where to start or what to start with. Thinking about your time for the day and all the tasks you need to finish is attached to the label time anxiety.
• Procrastination: You put off important tasks until the last minute. You feel overwhelmed and have cripling anxiety about performing at the last minute. These are also classic symptoms of poor time management.
• Constantly getting sidetracked: You’re easily distracted by emails, social media, or other distractions. You need to know from the start that context-switching wrecks your productivity.
• Inability to say “no”: You’re often overcommitting to multiple tasks or projects that seem beneficial to your growth but end up not finalizing your main projects.

💭 Side note: I’ve personally struggled with saying no at work and did thorough research on how to start saying no. I found a practical way and wrote all about it in the How to say no at work article.

• Neglecting yourself: You might have a great professional reputation as you’re doing a great job, but that puts a toll on your personal life. You don’t have a self-care routine, personal relationships, or mental health, and you are not feeling good about it.

How do I improve my time management skills?

There is no shortage of advice on the internet, but research made by the Academy of Management shows that there are three skills that separate success from failure in time management:

• Time awareness: Thinking and estimating time realistically, as time is limited.
• Time arrangement: Designing and organizing tasks, goals, and work schedules to use that time effectively.
• Time adaptation: Monitoring the use of time while performing activities and adjusting it as you go based on interruptions and changing priorities.

In other words, if you have a realistic approach to planning your time, you’re aware that time is limited, and you manage it with flexibility, you’re a successful time manager. Let’s unpack each of the above and see how you can work on them:

Master your time awareness

Time awareness is not about a gigantic time management strategy but about being realistic with your time and recognizing that, as much as you might wish otherwise, there are only 24 hours in a day.

It’s about developing a keen sense of how long tasks take rather than how long you wish they would take.

1. Audit your time

To become aware of how you spend your time, you must get up close and personal with your time habits.

An automatic time tracker can help with that. For example, Timeular tracks your time automatically and gives you an honest, objective look at where your hours are really going.

With a time audit, there’s no need for guesstimating or conveniently forgetting about those 45 minutes you spent scrolling through memes. The hard truth is that you now have a clear, data-driven picture of your time expenditure. Such a time audit, in Timeular, shows with precision how much time you spent on each task without any manual interference on your side.

One of its reports surfaces how much of your time was spent productively or not. Here’s a preview:

2. Estimate your time

As you’ve become time-aware, you can now make more realistic estimates and plans moving forward, and it’s time to put those insights into action. It’s beneficial to check the report with a framing in mind. The following questions can help:

• How much time did I estimate for Project X, and how much time did I spend?
• How long did similar tasks or projects take me in the past? Dive into your Timeular data and look for tasks or projects similar in nature or scope to your plan. Check how much time you spent on each phase or component, and use this as a baseline for your new project estimate.
• Do I tend to underestimate the time needed for research or revisions?
• Do certain types of tasks always take longer than you expect?
• What external factors impacted how much time I spent on Project X?
• What’s my average “productive” time per day or week? Use this to gauge how many high-priority tasks or projects you can realistically fit into your schedule and adjust your estimates based on your available capacity.

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• How much buffer time do I need to account for unexpected issues? Look at your time reporting system to see how much time you typically spend on unexpected tasks or issues, and build this buffer into your future estimates.

Master your time arrangement

In this stage, you put on your strategist hat and become the architect of your schedule. It’s about setting achievable short-term and long-term goals, prioritizing your tasks, and creating a time management plan that maximizes your productivity without sacrificing your sanity.

This is where you could make time management mistakes that lead to a poor work-life balance, heightened stress levels, and wasted time. So, let’s see how to be in control of the process:

1. Set realistic goals

The key to goal setting lies in deconstructing substantial objectives into manageable components that align with your productivity patterns. Rather than committing to ambitious targets like “complete the entire project overhaul by Friday,” focus on specific, measurable milestones: “finalize the initial framework by Wednesday afternoon.”

Here are the steps to consider in setting concrete goals:

• Make a reality check
  • Assess your current workload and ongoing projects
  • Review your time tracking data from previous similar projects
  • Consider your energy patterns throughout the day
  • Be honest about potential obstacles and limitations
• Apply the “Scaling Down” Method
  • Break large objectives into smaller, concrete milestones
  • Each milestone should be achievable within 1-3 work sessions
  • Define clear completion criteria for each milestone
• Set your success metrics
  • Establish specific, measurable outcomes for each goal
  • Define what “done” looks like in tangible terms
  • Create checkpoints to measure progress
  • Determine how you’ll track and evaluate results
• Build in strategic buffers
  • Add 20-30% extra time to the initial estimates for buffer time
  • Create contingency plans for your high-priority goals
• Align with your peak performance
  • Try to do the challenging tasks in your high-energy hours
  • Schedule routine tasks during lower-energy periods
  • Protect your most productive times from interruptions with time-blocking

2. Prioritize tasks the right way

All tasks feel urgent tasks at times, but you need to boost productivity and prioritize that one task that really moves the needle. I’ll introduce you to The Eisenhower Matrix to fulfill the above-mentioned purpose:

The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Time Management Matrix, was created by Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower during WWII. It’s a simple way of setting priorities for your tasks based on their urgency and importance.

This method categorizes tasks into four quadrants:

• Urgent, important: Do first (the fire-fighting mode).
• Important, not urgent: Schedule ( long-term important projects).
• Urgent, not important: Delegate (work that can be handled by someone else in your team).
• Neither urgent nor important: Delete: (these tasks are often time wasters, so they must be eliminated).

To prioritize your tasks with the Eisenhower Matrix, do the following:

1. List all tasks you have for the day.
2. Assess each task’s importance and urgency.
3. Place each task in quadrants accordingly.
4. Take action: Start with important and urgent tasks, followed by the other quadrants.

3. Organize your tasks

To organize your tasks, you can use a simple Kanban board. This visual workflow management tool helps you break down your projects into bite-sized tasks, track your progress, and identify bottlenecks before they derail your whole operation.

By organizing your work into clear, manageable stages, you can stay focused, avoid overwhelm, and celebrate your wins along the way. Plus, there’s just something satisfying about moving those little task cards from “in progress” to “complete.” It’s like the grown-up version of getting a gold star on your homework.

Kanban involves organizing tasks into three simple categories:

• To do
• In progress
• Done

Master your time adaptation

Time adaptation is about being flexible, staying present, and being intentional with your time. You need to adjust your strategy on the fly and not let unexpected interruptions or changing priorities throw you off your track. To hone your adaptation skills, you need to become a master monitor of your own time and energy.

This means regularly checking in with yourself, assessing your progress, and making adjustments as needed. Ask yourself questions like these:

• Am I spending too much time on low-priority tasks? Is that afternoon slump hitting you harder than a ton of bricks?

Don’t be afraid to pivot, delegate, or even take a well-deserved break when your body and brain tell you it’s time. When that 30-minute task sneaks into 45 minutes, don’t panic – use this data to refine your future estimates.

A key adaptation skill is learning to manage your energy, not just your time.

This means paying attention to your natural rhythms and working with, rather than against, your own biology. If you know you’re a morning lark who does your best work before noon, don’t force yourself to burn the midnight oil. If you’re a night owl who hits your stride after sunset, embrace it and structure your day accordingly.

And remember, even the best-laid plans sometimes go wrong. When that happens, don’t beat yourself up. Take a deep breath, reassess your priorities, and pivot with flexibility.

Fix your poor time management with the right tools

Powered by AI and supercharged with easy-to-use methods, Timeular helps you track your time and manage it in < 1 minute a day.

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Start mastering time management

By now, you should have learned that good time management skills imply being aware of your time and that it’s limited, then arranging it with a structure such as goals, priorities, Kanban board, and finally adapting to new challenges.

You won’t become a time management mastermind overnight, but with practice, you’ll achieve a better work-life balance and self-fulfillment as you conquer more tasks.

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