25. 5 Time Management Mistakes You’re Making (and What to Do Instead)
Episode 25
Time is our most valuable resource, which means that we should be doing everything in our power to ensure we’re spending it on the right things.
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I talk about the top 5 time management mistakes I see my clients make all the time (my students and my working professionals).
While these mistakes may seem harmless, I assure you they’re destroying your most valuable resource.
Here’s what you learn about time management in this value-packed episode:
The top 5 time management mistakes I see students and professionals making
The negative impact these mistakes have in our hours, days, years and lives (yep, serious stuff!)
Tons of practical strategies for fixing each of these top time management mistakes so that you walk away from the episode feeling confident and ready to tweak your approach to managing your time
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned:
→ Episode 01: What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One for Productivity
→ Episode 05: Secrets of a Good Task Management System
→ Episode 21: How to Plan Your Ideal Week (Weekly Planning Tips)
→ Episode 24: How to Focus Better: Tips for School, Work and ADHD
✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:
→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)
→ Weekly Planner (pdf)
-
The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
25 5 Time Management Mistakes I'll Bet You're Making, and What to Do Instead
===
[00:00:00] There is only one thing in our lives that is non replenishable. When it runs out, we cannot get more.
We can't stop its passing. We can't make it move slower and we'll never get it back once it's gone.
Now, of course you know what I'm talking about: time.
Time is arguably our most valuable resource. And that's why I am making the case today that learning how to manage our time is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves.
Now the ultimate goal of learning how to manage time is so that we can be intentional about how we spend it and who we spend it with.
You know, I don't know about you, but at the end of the day, literally and figuratively, I want to feel good about how I spent my time.
Not on a scale of, you know, minute to minute necessarily, but if we zoom out a lot and look at the months and the years I want to say yes, I spent my time with the right people doing the right things.
And I'm going to assume that you feel the exact same way. [00:01:00]
Now on this podcast, my goal is to be practical and provide realistic strategies that you can implement in your life to improve how you learn and work.
I think you know that. And I know I just went deep talking all about, you know, living a life full of intention and all that.
But if we were reverse engineer from there, we realized that how we spend our days, which most of us are spending them learning and working, adds up into how we spend our years.
And of course, how we spend our years adds up into how we spend our lives.
In this episode, I'm going to share five time management mistakes that I see students and working professionals make on a daily or a weekly basis. And it's not like making, you know, one of these mistakes once in awhile. Who's going to lead to an unfulfilling life.
That's not at all true. But if someone is making these time management mistakes, day after day, it has a compounding effect. And yes, I argue that eventually an accumulation of these [00:02:00] mistakes can add up to years, spent on the wrong things.
So my challenge for you today is to listen to this episode and be honest with yourself. Are you making any of these time management mistakes regularly? Of course, we all make them occasionally. Uh, including myself, but it's the duration, the intensity and the frequency that I want you to pay attention to.
Because again, we all have, you know, funky days and sometimes we just need to waste our time so we can disengage from whatever's happening around us.
No judgment there. But it's my clients who make these mistakes regularly, who are the most stressed out in the least fulfilled.
So let's get into what these five time management mistakes are. And of course I share alternatives and strategies for what to do instead. So for the sake of not wasting any more of your precious time, Let's get into it.
[00:03:00]
Okay, time management mistake number one that people make all of the time is not having total clarity.
Let me be more specific. People too often make the mistake of not having total clarity with their time and their tasks. Now I talked a lot about this on other episodes. Okay. And I will leave all of those links in the description box and in the show notes.
But we're going to talk about it again now because it's that important.
So to start, we need to remember that time is measurable. It's numbers. It's it's math really. But the mistake people make is that they often view time more abstractly, or even as a feeling.
We might [00:04:00] say things like, “oh, I think I'll have time for that.” Or “I feel like I'll be able to do that tomorrow afternoon.”
But saying things like “I think” and “I feel” in reference to time is the mistake.
And when we do this every day, it's what leads us to feeling overwhelmed and unfulfilled at the exact same time.
And then secondly, the second thing not having clarity on our tasks is another huge time management management mistake.
This is all part of mistake number one, by the way.
Whether we are a student or a working professional, we've got to have total clarity around what we are supposed to be doing.
Now it might be that you're in a position either professionally or academically, where all of your tasks are assigned to you. Like homework assignments, right? Um, or maybe your job is very black and white and you're just told what to do and you just execute.
Or it might be the case where you are the one who determines what you're doing and you have the autonomy to choose your own tasks. [00:05:00]
That could be the situation if you're you are your own boss, you run your own business, you're in a leader leadership position at your work. Or maybe you're a college or a graduate student that's, you know, doing a self study or like a dissertation of sorts.
Regardless of your situation, you have to know what it is that you are doing. What are the big projects that you're working on?
What are the micro-steps of those projects? What needs to get done by the end of this week?
And then more granularly- the tough one- what exactly are you going doing today? All right. When do these things need to get done by?
And then for each of these things that I just mentioned, do you know how to do that?
So let's say that, you know, you have a project due at the end of the week.
That's awesome. You know, that you have clarity on, you know, what you have.
But do you know exactly how to do it? Do you know where your materials are? Do you know where, um, how to do the process, like the exact steps of the process? Do you know the final expectation? [00:06:00] Do you know the criteria for success or the final product is supposed to look like?
So what I'm saying is that a huge time management mistake I see people make is not having total clarity. I mean that they're not absolutely clear on how much time they have and where they're spending it.
So, how do we fix this mistake? What do we do instead? Good question. I am glad you asked.
So we need to start by making time visible. Because, as I said earlier, time is math and it's numbers and we can measure it.
All right. So how do we make time visible? Well, with calendars and daily and weekly planning. We have to get in the habit of using calendars on a daily basis, if not multiple times a day.
We have got to get ourselves in the habit of being so truthfully honest about how much time we have in our day to get the things done.
Saying oh, [00:07:00] well, you know, I'm working from nine to five doesn't cut it. Saying, I'll do my homework after school doesn't cut it.
Because life doesn't work that way.
Are you really working from nine to five? Like, do you really have a solid eight hours in your day to focus on your work? That is not true. You have meetings, you have lunch, you have breaks, you have admin work, like checking emails and making phone calls. Right.
The strategy here is to maybe try something like time-blocking at least for a week so that you can inventory your time. I have a free download of a daily and weekly time blocker.
There's going to be two separate downloads in the description box and in the show notes- you can take one, you can take both. That's the place to start.
Whichever one you choose to use I want you to try using it for one week, so you can see where your time is going.
And then in terms of getting clarity on your tasks, I have an entire episode on task management that I want you to listen to if you haven't done so already. That is episode five- secrets of a good task management system.
You can get that [00:08:00] either the link in the show notes and description box, or by going to learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/05. In that episode I go over step-by-step how to capture and track all of your tasks that need to get done for school and work.
It's that process and that system that gets us total clarity.
Because honestly the bottom line here is that we cannot manage what we can't measure. Right. We can't manage what we can not see.
So, if we are ever going to get better at managing our time, we need to see it. And we need to measure it.
All right. So the second time management mistake that I see people make all of the time is just flat-out doing too much.
I am including this mistake right after the one that I just explained, because sometimes we don't even know that we're doing too much, unless we measure exactly what it is that we're doing and how much time we have, or don't have.
At the end of the day, we only have [00:09:00] so many hours that we can dedicate to school or work because I don't know about you, but like, we are more than workers and we are more than students.
We have friends and family and interests and things going on outside of school and work that we need to make time for. And if we don't measure our time, many of us overestimate how much time we have to work on our school and our work things.
We take on that extra project, we help our colleagues, whatever it is that they're working on, we volunteer to run next week's meeting.
We sign up for the afterschool club. We joined another team, we say yes. And yes. And yes. And yes. And we say yes, without ever answering the question: but when?
What we say yes to consumes actual literal mathematical time, minutes in our days and in our weeks.
So before we say yes to something, we need to run the numbers.
It's similar to budgeting and finance. So before we go buy a car, right, we ask ourselves, all right, like how [00:10:00] much is this going to cost me overall? How much is this going to cost me each month? What are the additional costs here, like insurance and gas and maintenance?
And then the ultimate question: do I have this money in my bank account? But as I've already said, a few times in this episode, time is our absolute, most valuable resource, even more so than money because we can always make more money, but we cannot make more time. So how can we guard our money? Better than we guard our time.
Am I. The only one who thinks that makes no sense. We need to approach our time commitments like they are financial commitments.
Do the math before we commit. And if the money so to speak is not in the bank account, we have to say no.
All right before I move on to mistake number three, I want to give a little word of caution though, about time [00:11:00] commitments. My whole spiel here is that we often say yes to things when we don't actually have the time.
Right.
But another mistake kind of like an offshoot of this one is saying yes to things that we don't want to do, even if we have the time.
So let's say you pull up your calendar and your calculator and you're debating whether or not to say yes to something. And you find out that mathematically, you can fit it into your schedule.
All right. The next question is this. Do you want to do it? Cause just cause you can doesn't mean that you should.
And a ninja-level time management skill is knowing the difference between can. And should.
All right. The third time management mistake I see people make all of the time is multitasking.
You may have heard this already, but multitasking is a myth. Yes, we can. You know, walk and talk to somebody at the same time, but that is only because only one of those tasks [00:12:00] is cognitively demanding.
Obviously the talking. The other activity, for most of us walking, is automatic, right? We don't need to continually make decisions about where we're putting our fleet feet.
Have you ever walked and talked, but then had to pause the conversation so that you could cross a busy street. That's because our cognitive resources can't be split between talking and timing a safe cross across the street.
We just can't do that. You can debate this all you want, but the evidence is solid that we cannot adequately perform two cognitively demanding tasks at once. And those of us who think we can, are actually engaged in a rapid back and forth switching between two tasks. All right. We're not actually doing two things at the same time.
It says rapid back and forth.
And this is terrible for time management and productivity, because it's this rapid back and forth switching between the two challenging tasks that leads to poor performance on both as well as [00:13:00] a much slower effort on both.
So, for example, let's say that you are writing something, maybe an essay or a report, or just something that involves concentration.
And then you get a notification that an email has arrived. And what you do is what many of us do, which is to tell yourself that we're just going to go quickly, check the email just real quick. And then we'll get back to our writing. This is a terrible idea. And not only is it terrible, but it's delusional because it's ignoring the truth that when we go from one task to another, it takes a significant amount of time to reengage with that first task.
So Cal Newport, he's one of my favorite resources on this subject.
He's a PhD from MIT. He's a professor of computer science at Dartmouth. So like super smart. He calls this cognitive residue. That is his crafty name for this clunky and sticky transition that we go through when we try to return to a task after being interrupted from it. Whether from an [00:14:00] email or a colleague or a quick check of our phones.
So, what is the solution here? Well, we single task. Work on one thing for a period of time and then be done with it.
Either because you complete the task or because you completed a certain amount of time that you said you would work on that task.
And then we move to another task either until it's done or until a certain amount of time passes that we said we would work on that task.
Now another strategy that can help us avoid multitasking and focus on single tasking is to start implementing admin blocks into our days. My very first episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, Episode 01, is all about how to implement administration blocks into our days and our weeks for this exact purpose.
And you might also be picking up on the pattern that all of these strategies work together. So if you do something like time-blocking, which I suggest we do in tip number one, then it naturally sets us up [00:15:00] to do single-tasking and to move away from multitasking.
I did that on purpose. Okay. Moving right along time management mistake number four is having or making poor time estimations.
You know, we all kind of stink at this one- until we don't. Like any skill, the way we go from stinking at it to not stinking at it is practice.
So many of us have recurring tasks in our days, right?
If you're a student, you are regularly reading and writing across multiple contexts. If you're a working professional, you are, I don't know. You know, maybe regularly meeting with clients or writing proposals or creating balance sheets or whatever it is that you do for work.
Of course, some of our days are spent doing, uh, like one-off activities. But for the most part, a lot of our time is spent on like the same four or five repetitive tasks over the course of a week.
And a mistake that we make is not accurately estimating how much time [00:16:00] these recurring tasks consume on average.
And when we poorly estimate how long tasks take us, we miss plan and we misjudge what we can get done in a day. We either overshoot or undershoot, but either way we end up where we don't want to be. Wasting time.
Now the way to fix this mistake is to get better or in more accurate at estimating the time it takes for us to complete these recurring tasks.
So let me give you an example.
I'm going to start with a student example and then I'll move to a professional one after that.
So let's say that you're a college student and that means that you're reading a lot for all of your courses. So therefore reading would be a recurring task that you would want to assess for time in this situation. So believe it or not, each of us has a natural reading pace. This is good because it can help us gauge how much time that we need to do our readings each day.
Okay. Now again, We're pretending you're a student. [00:17:00] So what you would do it, actually, this could work if you're not a student too, but anyways, What you would do is you would time yourself reading something like 10 pages.
You'd start the timer, you'd read 10 pages, and then you would stop the timer. And you collect the data about how long it takes you to read 10 pages. So that when you know, you have 20 pages of reading due for one course and 40 pages of reading for another course, you need to budget enough time for 60 pages of reading.
For the sake of wicked easy math that doesn't require us to think too hard, let's say that reading 10 pages took you 20 minutes.
So that would mean that 60 pages of text would take you 120 minutes to read or two hours. And remember what I said earlier, which is that we can't manage what we can't measure. Right. So now when you're planning your day and your week, you know, that you need to find 120 minutes somewhere in your schedule to do your reading. But someone who continues to make this time management mistake and [00:18:00] doesn't measure how long that it takes to read might see a 30 minute window in their schedule and say, oh, Hey, I'll just do my reading then. But based on what? Based on what data? Based on hope and wishful thinking? That is not what time management is.
Right. So let's look at an example in the professional space.
Let's say that you are a family physician. You see patients in your office at set appointment times clearly, that's something that you can measure for, but one of your recurring tasks is to write up your patient notes at the end of each day.
We would count this as a recurring task.
So how you would measure this is you would time yourself to see how long it takes you to write up the summary notes for maybe one patient. Let's say that takes seven minutes. And if you see 20 patients in a day, well, then, you know you need 20 times seven or 140 minutes in your day to write up these patient notes. So thinking that you can get this done during your 30-minute lunch [00:19:00] break is unreasonable.
So your homework is to think of two to three recurring tasks that you do most days of this week. You're going to time yourself doing this task and you are going to write this number down somewhere, and then you're going to use this information when you map out your week as I suggest in tip one.
I'm realizing here that I'm talking a lot about planning out your week.
And I haven't even mentioned episode which is called how to plan your ideal week. And that is full of step-by-step weekly planning tips that is linked below as well as a resource.
Alright, one final note about time estimations before we move on to our last tip. And that is that we also notoriously forget to consider commuting time, prep time, um, transition time when we're making our daily plan or estimating how long things will take.
So for example, if you're a real estate agent and one of your recurring tasks is to stage homes for open houses, and let's say that you have your system down and you can stage a home in an [00:20:00] hour.
Okay. I literally have no idea how long it takes to stage a home. So if you're a real estate agent and you're like, no chance, I'm sorry. I'm just doing easy math.
So let's just say it takes an hour. Okay. But isn't really an hour?
What about driving to the site, carrying things from your trunk into the place? Right? What about the time it takes you to break down and set up at the end of the open house? What about any paperwork that you need to complete at the end of the open house?
We need to factor in these invisible time costs into our time estimations because they're actually very real tasks that consume very real time. But for some reason, we always forget about them.
Alright, we've arrived at our last time management mistake. Time management mistake number five is not effectively managing distractions.
I feel like in one way or another, I talk about distractions and focus a lot in bits and pieces [00:21:00] and all of my episodes. The episode right before this episode, 24 is called how to focus better: tips for school, work and ADHD.
So if this is your biggest time management mistake, and you have enough self-awareness to know that, please listen to that episode.
Now, generally speaking, many of us are crummy at managing our distractions for one reason or another. And in many cases, we're not even aware that we've become distracted. When I was talking about multitasking in mistake, number three, I think it was three, I mentioned that many of us will stop what we're doing to just quickly check an email and to think nothing of it.
But that's a distraction that we need to manage.
I talk about this in episode 24, but distractions can be both internal and external, and there are things that we can do to manage both kinds.
I argue that internal distractions are the hardest to get a, a grasp on, particularly if you have [00:22:00] ADHD, but the external distractions, most of us have nearly complete control over.
We have control over our environment, whether we have tabs open where we're doing our work, who we're doing our work with, what we tell other people during periods of deep focus so that they don't interrupt us. What notifications we keep on our devices while we're working. These are all external factors that we have complete control over.
And if you're not doing absolutely everything possible to manage those types of distractions, even the internal ones, then we might as well gather all of our time into a bucket and dump it out the window.
Like, honestly. When we can focus on a single task that we are doing for an adequate amount of time to make progress on it, and we have identified that that is the right thing for us to be working on, we have mastered time management.
It's when we work distractedly on something while simultaneously, you know, checking this and checking that or zoning out or stopping to talk to whoever needs our attention, [00:23:00] that's when we waste massive amounts of time.
If you have one hour to work on something, do everything in your absolute power to set yourself up for success, you are going to get the most out of that hour if you have total clarity on what you're working on, right? That's step one, you set up your environment for total focus, you turn off your notifications, you let others know that you will be unavailable for a certain amount of time. Um, and that you've planned ahead to make sure that you actually have time in your calendar for that activity. Right there is how we manage our time.
Now I said at the top of this episode that I like to give practical strategies that you can actually use.
And that was my intention with today's episode, but I feel like I need to add a little disclaimer, that learning time management skills is not about learning how to cram more things into our day.
Like absolutely not. That is the opposite reason why I teach time management.
When we have adequate time management skills, we can use the [00:24:00] precious time that we have to work on the right things in terms of school and work, so that we have more free time to work and live and, and engage with the other aspects of life that makes us human. That is the ultimate point of time management if you ask me.
All right, real fast, a quick recap of the top five time management mistakes, I see students and working professionals make all of the time.
Mistake number one is not having total clarity around your tasks and your time. And this has to do with making time visible with calendars.
Time management mistake number two is just flat-out doing too much.
Time management mistake number three is multitasking.
Time management mistake number four is estimating time poorly.
And time management mistake number five is not effectively managing distractions.
Alright, that brings us to the end of the episode. Remember that you can submit questions for me to answer on future Q and A episodes by going [00:25:00] to learnandworksmarter.com and filling out the form on that homepage.
Have a beautiful day and remember to never stop learning.
