Want to improve your time management? Lower your expectations
I feel like such a failure: Nothing ever goes according to how I plan, and no matter how hard I try, I can never get everything done that I want to do.
Sound familiar?
If so, you’re not alone. As a time management coach for almost 18 years, I’ve seen that the gap between what you plan to do and what you actually accomplish is the biggest factor in how satisfied you feel with your time management.
Imperfect planning and execution can lead to missed deadlines and broken commitments. And even if you do get all of your most essential activities done on time, you might give yourself an F on time management if you fail to meet your own expectations.
If you find yourself constantly frustrated by the results of your planning, the answer isn’t to abandon the process. Instead, adjust your expectations so that when your plans don’t go perfectly, you can still keep your word and feel good about what you have and haven’t gotten done.
You’re Not Going to Plan Perfectly
Even if you’re very good at planning, you can’t possibly know how long everything will take down to the minute. Maybe you have one day where you receive a much higher volume of email than normal or another day where a client emergency comes up or yet another where the system that houses the data you need for a report is glitchy. And when you’re working on something unfamiliar, like an entirely new style of presentation, you’ll have the X factor of a learning curve.
Given this reality, it’s important to accept that planning helps you to prioritize what to focus on right now, to work ahead on big projects instead of waiting until the last minute, and to know if something new is worth diverting your attention from what you planned to do. But it doesn’t ensure you’ll get everything done you intended to do in a day, and that’s OK.
Lowering your expectations for how well you’ll plan lessens the chance of being annoyed and increases the likelihood that you’ll continue your planning habit. And if possible, I recommend having an hour in each workday that’s not designated to a particular activity to give yourself some margin for error.
You Can’t Always Execute Perfectly
As I mentioned, a variety of factors outside your control can affect your ability to plan perfectly. But sometimes, the variable that keeps you from getting things done is you. You get distracted. You don’t do what’s on the plan. You get too perfectionistic about one little thing and then don’t get the other parts of the project done.
If this is a perpetual issue, you may need to seek help from a time management coach, like myself, to help you overcome your struggles. But even the most effective individuals have off days where they’re tired or unfocused or get off track for whatever reason.
Acknowledging this truth can give you the motivation to start working on time-sensitive tasks well before they’re due. For smaller items, I recommend planning to finish two days before your deadline. If you have to deliver something to your boss by Friday, plan as if you’ll get it wrapped up by Wednesday. That way if you don’t execute perfectly, you still have Thursday and potentially some time on Friday to get the work done without having to put in lots of time after hours.
For very large projects, I encourage my clients to aim to complete the work two to four weeks before the deadline. It’s much better to push yourself harder at the beginning of a project and then have extra time at the end than to start at a leisurely pace and be pulling all-nighters in the final few weeks.
Lowering your expectations of how well you’ll execute reduces stress and helps you to stay positive and meet deadlines even if not every single day is as productive as you would like.
You won’t be able to do everything
Another huge issue a lot of people experience with time management: They see planning as writing down a long list of everything they hope will fit in a day or a week without comparing that list to how much time they actually have available.
A list is not a plan. A list is a dataset that you need to translate into a plan for your day or your week by deciding what’s the highest priority, then looking at your calendar to see where you have time to get those tasks done.
If you have only three hours during your workday where you’re not in meetings and you need to spend an hour of that time answering Teams messages and email, you have two hours to get other tasks done. When you plan, look at your list of potential tasks and decide which ones can be completed or moved forward in those two hours. Everything else will need to wait unless you can cancel or reschedule meetings or multitask during them, or you intend to work outside your normal hours.
It may feel painful to realize how little time you have to get things done. But that discomfort on the front end when you’re planning is a positive force to help you make clear choices on what really needs to happen right now and what must be delayed or delegated. Then at the end of the day, you can know that you used your time toward what mattered most. You’ll know whatever you didn’t get done wasn’t some failing on your part but simply a reflection of the truth that time is limited.
As a time management coach, I always want to help people achieve as much as they possibly can with their time. But the key to that breakthrough isn’t always expecting more. Sometimes, expecting less is what is most needed to stay consistent, positive, and resilient with your time management.
