Bad Time Management Behaviours

You are always late or last to arrive where ever you are supposed to appear.  Your first word when you arrive is “sorry”.

I had a coworker who is like this. She was always late. Always doing that one more thing before going to a meeting or leaving to go somewhere else. I learned not to carpool with her, and let her come to meetings at work when she found the time to do so (which was late). Which leads me to nr 2 ->

Not only you are late because you can’t manage your time. You cause others to be late, too. Your kids don’t arrive in time to school or hobbies. Or your carpools means a car full of angry looking faces. Again you are so so sorry. You do know this is very disrespectful towards others, don't you? 

You have no to-do-list. All the stuff that needs doing just floats in your chaotic mind. The word “sorry” gets company: namely “I forgot!”

If you do have a to-do-list, you don’t prioritize. You do things from the list but in a haphazard manner, jumping from one task to another like a panicked bunny. You find yourself doing the important things at the last minute (“sorry!”) or not done at all in time (and you just may resort to the old white lie “I just didn’t have the time!”)

You cannot handle distractions. Phone bings - you check what has happened - someone liked your tweet? Your family members pull at your sleeve and you stop whatever you were doing, no matter how important it was. The TV is on and you hear your favourite show starting - woops, how did you end up watching it when you were supposed to do something completely different? And what is that email that just came to your inbox?

You procrastinate. You don’t get started, even though you know you should. Somehow you just don’t seem to find that perfect moment when inspiration hits you. In other words you cannot find motivation to start.

You don’t have time to do anything because you are a perfectionist and don’t want to let anything leave your hands unless it is perfect. Delegating isn't your thing - the others might do things in the wrong way, if at all.

There’s a word for such a person: a micromanager. One who doesn’t trust others to do a job.

You find yourself constantly doing things for other people because you cannot say “No!” And deep inside you are not happy when you have taken yet another burden from someone else's shoulders without really wanting to.

You constantly tell everyone how busy you are, and how you just don’t have the time. Could it be you love that adrenaline rush that being busy gives?

When you could have an opportunity to stop and concentrate, you no longer can. Calming down and gathering your wondering thoughts feels like herding cats. 

You are constantly multitasking. You speak on the phone, advice the kids, scroll your emails and messages and try write a shopping list, maybe run a home-based business, all at the same time.

You never take breaks. For goodness sakes - who has time for breaks?

You waste the times when you have more energy to do little insignificant things, and then try to concentrate on the important to-dos when you are knackered.

You are constantly tired and have sleeping difficulties. You go to bed dead tired only to find yourself awake in the middle of the night, listening to the constant chatter of your mind. Life is a blur.

You begin to forget things. No, it doesn't have to mean you have dementia. That's just what over-worked and tired brains do: when there are too many things pulling your to different directions, you  begin to forget things. 

Again and again you try to convince yourself that you can do it in a much shorter time than your task actually requires.

You carry a huge planner and in regular bouts of bad conscience you sit down to fill it with every single thing that should have been done ages ago but you never did. Almost every hour has its own to-do-list. After writing them down,  for a few moments you feel that now you have it all planned. You are finally on top of managing your time. But in fact - you are not. Such extreme time management just doesn’t work in the long run. At its worst looking at that list of undone things just adds to your stress.

Despite all your efforts you find yourself not even finishing the things you started.