11 Symptoms of poor time management

​Poor time management affects every part of your life. Many people convince themselves that they are effective time managers because their diary is full. They are constantly rushing from one place to another, and they feel that they are incredibly busy. Having a full diary does not mean that you are managing your time correctly; it merely means that you have a full diary. This is the most fundamental principle of time management, and one which is constantly misunderstood i.e. effectiveness is far more important than efficiency. Efficiency and effectiveness are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. Allow me to differentiate:

​The following list covers some of the most common signs of poor time management. Regardless of the quantity of work you complete; if you are experiencing these symptoms, you are likely to have some poor time management practices.

You are regularly late for your appointments or completing your tasks. This may be due to you accepting too many tasks or your inability to assign the correct amount of time to your activities. Poor punctuality almost always impacts others and, as a result, usually has a negative impact on the quality of your relationships.

Of course, the other extreme is also possible. You may be suffering from poor punctuality because you cannot motivate yourself to get up off your backside and do the things that you are supposed to be doing.

This may be a simple motivation problem; or it may be that you have fallen into one of the most common traps of poor time management i.e. your time management objectives are not aligned with your goals.

You need to decide what is truly important i.e. your goals and gear your time management to achieving those goals. Your goals become your priorities and your priorities are scheduled first. If what you have scheduled is not a priority; deep down, you know that.

You can then lose your motivation to be punctual because you see no point in the task / project /  meeting. You start turning up late, without a care in the world and you become known for your poor time management.

There will be times when everybody has to rush a little; however, if you find yourself constantly rushing from one appointment to another then your time management is poor. A skilled time manager allows sufficient time between appointments to cope with unforeseen events e.g. a previous meeting overrunning.

Some people are constantly rushing because they leave everything to the last minute. They fail to see the big picture e.g.

‘if meeting A runs late, meeting B will start late and then I will have to spend all night completing the work I was supposed to do today.’

They are not organised enough to see how much they have to do, and they regularly forget half of the things that they have agreed to until somebody is screaming down the phone, wanting to know why the job hasn’t been done yet. Even if they use a calendar, they probably don’t use it properly.

In addition, not every task / project that you agree to belongs in a calendar so it is important to maintain an effective organisational system which allows you keep track of everything that you have agreed to. The very awareness of how much you have agreed to is often enough to cause you to stop agreeing to so much, thus reducing your rushing and your poor time management.

Impatience is usually a sign of poor time management. Having failed to allow sufficient time for a task or, having procrastinated excessively, you find yourself under extreme pressure to make a deadline. You may accuse other people, or technology, of delaying you but the truth is that you have failed yourself by failing to manage your time properly.

One of the hidden causes of impatience, with regard to poor time management, is the use of deadlines. Deadlines can be a wonderful tool for getting you to take action and work hard. But that is only true if the deadline is necessary. If it is not necessary, then you only heap unnecessary pressure on yourself.

What you should be working on in any given moment is the most important task you can complete, there and then, with the time and resources available to you. But if you add a deadline unnecessarily, you ruin your ability to focus on what is important. For example:

If a task has a deadline of 5pm today, you are going to work flat out to get it done on time. But if you only made that deadline up; could you have been doing anything more important? Maybe there was a task which needs to be done by close of business tomorrow. You could have worked on that today and left yourself with less of a rush tomorrow.

If you reduce the pressure and the rushing, you will also eliminate a great deal of the impatience and poor time management.

Your goals help you to identify your priorities. They outline what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it by and the importance of the task. If you do not have clearly defined goals, how are you supposed to know which tasks need to be prioritised? A skilled time manager knows to take time to set clearly defined goals, around which their activities can be scheduled.

I have already touched on the importance of having clear goals but what I cannot stress enough is that the more defined your goals are, the easier it becomes to eliminate poor time management and make clear decisions about what you need to do and, when it needs to be done.

The 80/20 principle tells us that not every task is of equal importance. Roughly 20% of the tasks you perform will be responsible for approximately 80% of the positive outcomes you achieve. The percentages may differ slightly, but the important thing is that a small percentage of tasks will produce far better results than all your other tasks combined.

The more clearly your goals are defined, the easier it is to identify the 80/20 tasks which will get you the best results and, the tasks which are not a good use of time.

Sometimes, you know what needs to be done but you keep putting it off. Eventually, when you decide to complete the task, the deadline is usually looming large and you are under pressure to complete the task in time. Repeated procrastination can result in stress and poor performance.

Procrastination, once it happens, rarely remains your only problem. You soon become overwhelmed, you start to rush and you beome impatient. It doesn't take long for an endless spiral of poor time management to kick in.

It is possible that the reason you are procrastinating is that you realise that what you are supposed to be doing is not very important. Therefore, why work hard on it if is not going to make much of a difference? If this is the case, you need to revisit your goals.

However, there are many different reasons why you might be procrastinating and each of these reasons has its own solution, So, if your poor time management is caused bv procrastination, the first step is to understand why you are procrastinating so that you can then take the appropriate action to rectify the problem.

You can get away with poor time management for a while but eventually it catches up on you. You begin to miss deadlines; you are constantly late for appointments and your impact on other people becomes too much for them to cope with.  Your productivity levels decline and your backlog increases.

Too many people think high performance is about getting a great deal of work done but quantity is not as important as you might think. If you are getting a lot of work done but that work is unimportant, are you really performing to a high level? Of course not.

There are plenty of people with poor time management who get a lot of work done. The key to high performance is to know what is important and to focus on getting that done. You cannot make more time; you can only make better decisions about how you allocate your time. And that is what high performance is – better decisions about how to allocate your time and resources.

​When you have poor time management skills, you are constantly chasing your tail. You constantly fall behind in tasks and you have to work extra hard to catch up. Eventually, your energy levels begin to drop and you lose motivation. It becomes harder to catch up and so you fall further behind which drains you of even more energy.

Energy managmeent is just as important as time management. In fact, the two go hand in hand. Orgainsing your time is wonderful but if you don't have the energy to do anything, that time management is going to go to waste.

Poor time managmeent can come about becasue you haven't been managing your energy levels effectively.

 Due to a lack of energy, it takes longer to get everything done and you start to fall behind in your work which then puts you under pressure, drains you of more energy and takes up more of your time.

This is one of the symptoms which I have suffered from myself. You spend so much time trying to prepare and make sure that you perform the task perfectly that you either fail to start or go incredibly slowly.

In reality, very few tasks are ever performed perfectly but when you are overcome by a need for perfection, it can be hard to see that.

Perfectionism can also damage your relationships with others because you make unrealistic demands of them. Nobody wants to work with someone who can never be pleased and; who berates them for failing to reach standards which cannot be reached.

If you cannot maintain healthy working relationships, poor time management is assured because you cannot do everything on your own.

It is essential that you remember that perfection is neither possible nor necessary. Just do the best you can at that moment in time. Once you have completed a task, you get feedback which, if necessary, will allow you to make improvements.

When you are faced with more than one option, you are unable to choose an option and run with it. You spend excessive time going over the options without coming to a conclusion.

Yet again, this can be traced back to poorly defined goals. When you have clearly defined goals, you have clear criteria for determining the most important thing that you can do at given moment in time. You determine which task / project is going to get your time based on the return that you will get from completing that task.

As a simple example, imagine you must choose between 2 tasks which will take 1 hour to complete and; task A will make you $50 while task B will make you $100. Which would you choose. Assuming all things are equal and, your goal is to make more money; you would choose task B.

Of course, not all tasks take the same amount of time and some tasks have greater costs than others. You will also find yourself in positions where there are other restrictions on which tasks you can work on e.g. time available, energy levels, resources available etc. But as long as you have clear goals and you have captured all of the commitments you have made, you can easily decide what you should be doing with just one question:

‘What is the most important task I can complete with the time and resources available to me?’

​If you struggle to decide what you should be doing, this audio will help:

It is great to be able to help others but if you are always helping others, you are rarely working on the tasks which are important to you. Constantly saying ‘Yes’ will leave you with an excessive workload. One of the quickest ways to improve your time management is to be assertive and learn to say ‘No’.

From a work perspective, it can seem like a great idea to help others out and, it often is. But it is only helping them out if it is an occasional occurrence. If you are constantly doing some of their work, you are not helping them out; you are doing their job for them. If they can’t do their own work without having to constantly seek your help, then they have their own time management problems which need to be dealt with.

By saying ‘Yes’ to every one of their requests, you are only helping them to avoid dealing with their poor time management and; you are damaging your own time management in the process.

​One of the clearest signs of poor time management is when you do everything yourself. It doesn’t matter whether you are self-employed or an employee; there are always tasks which can be delegated, automated or outsourced. These tasks need to be identified and removed from your workload.

Quite often, you don’t realise how much you do until disaster strikes and you spring straight into action. It may then cross your mind that you shouldn’t be doing this, but you didn’t even stop to think about whether it was a job for somebody else.

Maybe you are worried that others can’t manage without you or, you feel that you must constantly prove your worth. Whatever the reasons, this is an unhealthy mindset and it will impact on your physical health too, if it continues unchecked.

Excellent time management is not defined by the amount of work you do or, how important you are deemed to be. An endless task list is more often a sign of poor time management than good. A good time manager makes use of all the resources at his/her disposal, including people.

They understand the difference between being responsible for getting the work done and, doing the work yourself. As soon as a task arrives on their desk, they can quickly determine if it is a job for somebody else and if it is, they quickly move it on. Whatsmore, they realise that delegation provides a great learning opportuity for the person whom they delegate to.

​Poor time management impacts every area of your life, from work to relationships. Don’t fall into the trap of mistaking being busy for being a skilled time manager. Getting more done does not automatically mean that you are managing your time effectively. If the extra tasks are unimportant, you are just filling your schedule. Focusing on getting the important tasks done is the key to effective time management.  If you find that you are regularly displaying any of the symptoms of poor time management; you need to change your focus from efficiency to effectiveness.