Overcoming Bad Time Management
Do you often find yourself burdened with all the tasks that you left unfinished? If that’s the case, then you might have a problem in managing time. Time management plays a vital role in our life, it is used for making our daily tasks easy to arrange and keeping us away from wasting our precious time. “Time management is about life management”, this quote comes from a bestselling author, Idowu Koyenikan. This quote delivers a strong message about how time management is basically the root of a well managed life. To get our life managed, we need to fix the bad time management first. The importance of time management needs to be practiced frequently on our daily basis in order to gain tons of benefits from it. The effective ways to overcome our bad time management are separated into three steps and those are setting our goals, doing the easier tasks first, and applying the 5-second rule.
We can start by setting goals for the first step. Setting a goal here means taking small steps or progressing actively to gain our desired outcome. The outcome can be anything we prefer, for our case, it can be finishing tasks right in time and not delaying important activities. A neuroscience research states that when we set a certain goal, we are biologically programming our brains to create new behaviors. Focusing on specific goals allows our brain to create stronger bonds between neurons that increase the chance for us to achieve our desired goals. For setting goals, we need to write down all the outcomes that we want to achieve in the future. Writing them down helps us recognize which goal is more important than the others. A study in Harvard also found that people who wrote down their goals were more likely to achieve them than those who didn’t. This study proves that writing goals is a major step in setting goals because when we write something, we can remember it well and keep us from drifting away our focus to unimportant things. Writing takes some efforts, so does taking action of our own goals, after doing all that, we can finally conclude our goals by reflecting on them. For example, we can always identify the progress of completing one of the goals and look for mistakes. By knowing our mistakes, we will have a space for improvements. Mistakes force us to improve, not to blame ourselves. Set aside time each day or week to reflect on our progress, write down our thoughts or insights, and celebrate for the goals that we have ticked off the list.
Moving onto the next step, it is doing the easier tasks first then the harder ones. When we face a whole series of mixed tasks and don’t have any idea where to start, we must list down all of them. This particular list has to be set from the easier tasks to the harder tasks. Then, we start doing the easier ones first, but why? Easy tasks don’t require much attention and effort, therefore we will finish them quickly or right just in time. By finishing these easy tasks, we feel the sense of achieving goals and our brain will release dopamine. As quoted from nhahealth.com, dopamine has been called the “motivation molecule” for providing the drive and focus we need to be productive. This simply means that dopamine allows us to be more motivated, hence craving to finish more tasks. As we crave to do more tasks, we will eventually deal with the harder tasks with no doubt and we still have a lot of additional time because we did the easy tasks first, so that we won’t be in a rush. Always keep in mind that we should complete the list of tasks one by one, we don’t want to be burdened by doing three tasks in a row. We just need to focus on one task and after we finish it, then we can advance to the next task.
Last but not least, we might want to give the 5-second rule a try. This rule is popularized by a motivational speaker, Mel Robbins. It is actually easy to do, when we know that we have to do something important, but then we hesitate due to fear and doubt, just simply count down from 5. After we get down to 1, take action immediately no matter what our guts tell us. The 5-second rule might sound overly simplistic, but it does work. Counting backwards from 5 interrupts our brain hesitancy and ignites the prefrontal cortex, a part of our brain that is responsible for decision-making. This rule shifts our intention of doing a task into decisive action, therefore overcoming laziness and procrastination. Research also shows that by applying the 5-second rule, we redirect our brain’s focus from the amygdala (responsible for fear and hesitation) to the prefrontal cortex, starting an immediate action and overcoming the fear of failure. This rule is beneficial in daily basis, we don’t need to spend much time anymore just to wait for a sudden motivational surge, life is too short for it, so go count down from 5 and get your responsibilities done.
In summary, overcoming bad time management comes in three steps, setting goals, doing the easier tasks first, and applying the 5-second rule. To set goals, we can do it by writing all the goals and reflect on our progress, also don’t be so hard on ourselves if we make mistakes. Doing easier tasks first allows us to release dopamine that sparks motivation to deal with the harder tasks. Applying the 5-second rule benefits our daily life by battling the fear of failure and shifts it into a decisive action. Of course, by doing the steps above doesn’t instantly make us good at managing time, it needs courage, it needs patience, and it also needs a lot of practice. Remember, small steps matter.
