Time and stress are always closely tied together. Most of your stress will likely come from you being worried about not finishing your work on time, and that same stress will likely delay you even further, which ends up becoming a vicious cycle that leaves you stressed out and without much work done.
When you’re stressed out because you don’t feel like you have enough time to complete a project, the logical thing to do would be to get to work. However, that rarely ends up being the case.
Chances are, if you’re stressed out about work, you’ll find ways to distract yourself so that you feel better in the mere short term, while in the long term you’re going to be making things much worse for yourself.
There are all kinds of excuses that you’ll see yourself come up with. You might claim that you’re distracting yourself to be more creative for a bit or to get yourself feeling better so that you can then work more efficiently.
Even if that’s true, chances are high that you’re going to be spending more time than you’re saving, leading to you having even less time to actually complete your project. With time management skills, you can avoid this situation altogether, because it’s difficult to get out of once you’re in it.
First, you can carefully plan out your project’s schedule and how long it’s going to take you to do it. Don’t cut corners at this stage – you need to be completely honest. If you claim that a part of your work will only take 30 minutes, because that’s the fastest you can do it, don’t count on that.
If there’s a chance it’ll take you two hours, budget for that to take you two hours. If you end up taking less time, that’s great. However, if you do take up that much time, you’ll have already accounted for it, so you won’t be playing catch-up.
You need to also cut out any time distractions to see how much of your time is being spent on things that aren’t work. You’d be surprised how quickly time can fly when you’re watching shows online or scrolling through social media. That time could be better spent getting ahead in your work or catching up if that’s what you need to do.
It takes a lot of discipline to try to ignore these distractions, but you do need to try to set boundaries. The question is “How?”
No matter how hard you may try to avoid it, you’re going to be put in situations where you’re working and getting constantly interrupted. It can happen in many places, whether it be at work with other co-workers, somewhere with friends, or at home with your family.
For example, let’s say that you’re working at home writing up some documents on your laptop. Your kids might come in and start talking to you or make loud noises in the background again and again.
What you shouldn’t do is get mad at them, but rather you should tell them to be quiet during certain times of the day or interact with them every so often so that they’re less prone to interrupting you later on.
The situation with your family can depend on age as well. Toddlers won’t understand very easily that you need to focus on work, so try and patiently work with them to not come in so often, or try and play with them a bit more when you can so that they feel like they’re seeing you enough.
With older kids they can be a bit more understanding, so you should be able to explain it to them, and with teens they probably want to be in their own rooms anyway. When it comes to coworkers, you don’t want to seem like a complete stick in the mud, but you also have to be able to focus on the work you’re there to do.
Ask them nicely to talk later when you’re not working, and if that doesn’t work, get a little sterner. They of all people should hopefully understand that you need work, and if they’re still preventing you from doing your work, you might have to take the problem to someone above you instead of dealing with it personally.
Finally, you have friends that can be distracting. They might badger you into going out and hanging out with them, or prod you about working too much, but you should be able to tell them that you have to work, and you’ll just have to organize some time to hang out later.
As you can appreciate, all of this can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to manage your time and distractions, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched but it does really work.
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