How to Stop Being Last Minute With Your Time Management
So many of the learners on our Time Management Training tell us, ‘I work better under pressure’ or ‘I work best when I’m up against it’ or ‘That’s when I’m most creative’. Is this you? Maybe sometimes? 2 Ways to Stop Being Last Minute with Your Time Management is about explaining what is behind this behaviour so that you can make a more conscious choice.
Do You Have the Perfectionist Driver?
An American psychologist named Taibi Kahler, PhD, identified five drivers that motivate humans, and we typically have a preference for one driver. Like many of our behaviours, it is believed that these drivers were shaped during childhood. The drivers are:
- Be Perfect – Were your parents keen that you did a task very well?
- Be Strong – ‘Big boys don’t cry’ – Said a parent to their child.
- Hurry Up – Did you always want to get it done first?
- Please Others – Seeking approval was and is important for these people.
- Try Hard – Those that stopped at nothing to get the job done.
If you have the perfectionist driver this may partly explain why your time management is last minute. Each driver has its strength and its weakness and no one driver is better than another. The challenge is about understanding ourselves, not changing ourselves.
The ‘Be Perfect’ driver will encourage you to continually improve a piece of work, like a presentation, right up until the deadline. So, even though you initiated it with a good head start, you’ve squandered your time on minor alterations to attain perfection, such as altering font size or relocating the slide number. Instead of leaning further toward an 80:20 approach, where you begin to grasp that these modifications yield minimal impact.
Actions:
- Recognise that you have the ‘Be perfect’ driver.
- Accept it.
- Identify when a task has achieved ‘good enough’.
Do You Manage Deadlines or do Deadlines Manage You?
There is a reason many people work right up until the deadline. It is because they want the deadline to manage the amount of time a piece of work takes to complete. For example, if the presentation is first thing Tuesday morning, most people will have great intentions of starting the presentation days before, but ‘things just get in the way’. Your subconscious is busy calculating all the plans to build up your stress to start at the very last possible minute – 5.33pm on Monday night when everyone has gone home and you can ‘get on with some quality work’. By doing it this way a hard deadline is in place meaning that you can only work up until 9pm-ish (Maybe midnight!) on the presentation.
Managing the deadline becomes less comfortable when you must determine the time required to complete the task. If you initiate the presentation three days in advance, steer clear of the temptation to utilise the ‘extra time’ for turning the presentation into a super snazzy one, contacting the design agency, or trying to analyse additional data to substantiate another fantastic point.
To avoid the deadline managing you, identify the objective/s of the presentation. Then work towards those, desperately ignore any self-talk to significantly go beyond the objectives, and start earlier.
Actions:
- Recognise that this is what you do.
- Accept it.
- Write down your objectives for a presentation and stick to them.
Action: For even more useful content on time management, check out our ultimate guide on Time Management skills.
