6 Time Management Personalities and How They Manage Their Time

You are indecisive and often deals with things in the nick of time. But procrastination has a physical and social toll as your body and your coworkers get stressed over it.

Solution: Reserve time for work and start in small chunks. After starting, it’s easier to continue. Forcing yourself to start makes use of the Zeigarnik Effect, which states that not finishing a task creates mental tension and the only way to alleviate the anxiety is by completing what you started.

You are obsessed with your idea of perfection and end up spending way too much time on a specific task. This leads to feelings of being overwhelmed, missed deadlines and delaying other priorities.

Solution: Make sure you have achievable standards that don’t get in the way. Train yourself to do things that fall short of your idea of perfection until you begin to accept that the “imperfect” but functional is enough for most things.

You often miscalculate how long it will take to do something to the point of missing deadlines and having to reschedule.

Solution: Schedule more time than you expect to take to finish a task, learn how to work faster and to estimate time more accurately. Reviewing past assignments duration will give you good time estimates for future reference.

The person who always says “yes” to others and has trouble establishing boundaries. They often put other’s priorities ahead of their own and find themselves short of time and overwhelmed.

Solution: Stop saying “yes.” Identify your priorities at home and work and consider how they will be affected before accepting any request.

Multitaskers believe they can juggle multiple things at once. But in reality trying to multitask leads to incomplete tasks, mistakes, and less accomplishments.

Solution: Single-tasking. Make sure that you give each task your full attention before moving on to a new one. Set aside specific blocks of time for essential functions and make sure you won’t be distracted during them.

If you like being efficient and have no problem tackling new problems or emergencies but feel like everything is an emergency, then you’re a firefighter personality.

Solution: To avoid the stress of treating everything like a crisis, identify and prioritize your tasks by urgency and importance. The Eisenhower Matrix is a strategy that can help you as it sorts your tasks into four urgency categories giving your work more direction.

It may be tempting to blame others when we feel crunched for time. The reality is that how we spend or waste time is of our own choosing.

Learning how to manage your time takes time. Tracking your time, understanding your time management style, developing new habits and lots of trial and error are necessary