5 (Stupidly) Simple Time Management Tips -

These are 5 simple tricks that I use to help me manage my time (and anxiety!) better. When I do these things I feel better and am way less stressed about my timing. Nothing groundbreaking, but actually doing these things makes a serious difference.

5 Time Management Tips

Advanced preparation
- Prepare everything ahead of time so that when it’s time to do something, you don’t lose precious time thinking about what it is that you need to do.
- Example: Look up the route and travel time it takes to get somewhere a day before you need to go. Make sure you look it up for the time of day that you’re going. Check the weather too in case it could affect traffic.
Measure how long it actually takes you to do things to have realistic time expectations
- As they say: What gets measured, gets managed.
- Example: A lot of us are guilty – we swear that we can get ready in 30 minutes but actually take an hour. After so many times, you’ve got enough experience to know how long it actually takes to get ready. You can get really granular with it and use a timer – how long does it take to pick an outfit? To do your hair? Makeup? Pack your bag? Now that you’re armed with this knowledge, plan accordingly for future events.
Give yourself more time than you think you need
- Obvious, right? Give yourself a little extra cushion in your schedule for everything. Expect the unexpected. And if everything runs smoothly that means you have extra time for yourself – a win!
- Example: Leave early!
Give yourself a limited block of time to get something done
- (Although it sounds like a direct contradiction to #3, this is a good one!) Parkinson’s law states that the amount of time it takes to do a task will expand to fill the amount of time you have to do it. In other words, if you have one hour to do a task, it’ll take an hour. If you have 20 minutes to do a task, you can honestly probably knock it out in 20 minutes.
- Example: I’m using this principle to write this blog post right now! My family’s coming home in an hour so I’m giving myself that much time to write, edit, and post this piece and put it on Pinterest. Normally I could drag this out over a few days – not this time!
Use little pockets of time that you might otherwise blow off
- There are moments throughout the day where you have some spare time but it never feels like enough to do anything substantial. A lot of these are those brief periods of waiting before the actual scheduled thing, like waiting in line to checkout or waiting for your friend to show up for your coffee date. Don’t waste these minutes scrolling! Take the opportunity to small things that will help you out later – look up doctors to compare later, pay that bill, research that new opportunity.
- Example: I needed to get a friend’s daughter’s birthday gift so in a few free moments here and there I shopped around on Amazon for some options. I just looked up some stuff and added to cart while I could. This made it so much easier for me later when all I had to do was check out the different options I’d already added, compare them, and make a final purchase.

That’s it! My 5 most effective, embarrassingly simple time management tips.

But if you’re like me, there’s something bigger at play with your historically bad time management.

Enemies of Progress

“Laziness,” self-doubt, procrastination, self-sabotage, self-protection, fear of failure, unwillingness to go out of your comfort zone and step into growth for fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of your self-doubts being confirmed. Can you relate?

The thing is, even the most successful people deal with these same challenges. So what separates the people who get stuck from the people who push through?

Part of it is learning to implement habits that make it easier to override the common obstacles. Stupidly simple stuff like my 5 tips above.

Because what separates the people who succeed from the ones who never manage to realize their goals and dreams lies in the action.

“The distance between your dreams and reality is called action” – Brian Tracy

Action is Key

Taking action can be hard. I’d bet that you constantly get in your own way for all the reasons listed above.

How do you get out of it? Recognize and call out your fear for what it is. Address it head on by feeling the feelings, processing and releasing them, then taking incremental actions to get you closer to your goal.

Just don’t get caught in the trap of taking ineffective action – there is such a thing as too much research, and that’s fear wrapped up in a different outfit all over again.

If you’re really going to grow, be honest with yourself. If you can, have an accountability partner or work with a coach. And if you don’t have those, you need to push yourself.

Overcoming Perfectionism

Release the need to be perfect. That’s an excuse and perfection is an illusion anyway. Messy inspired action will take you further than a perfectly designed plan. Give yourself a set amount of time to brainstorm and plan; after that time is up, release the need to perfect it and go over it again and again. It’s going to change, so don’t waste your time trying to get it all right right now.

You’ll see all kinds of successful people take this approach. Everyone I look up to operates like this. They don’t hold themselves back from sharing what they have with the world, they put it out there! We never hear anything from the people who get stuck in idea-land; they could have life-changing ideas and we’d just never know because they’re never born into the world through action.

And ideas and content and the way you say things have an expiration date in the sense that there is a vitality to what you are saying RIGHT NOW that will resonate with people and the times and current events. If you hold on to it because you’re scared to release it now, it won’t have the same impact if you wait to share it later. (Note: There’s a big difference between being inspired and being impulsive; make sure you share things from a grounded and stable place, and not when you’re in an emotional and reactive state. Just my two cents so you don’t take my advice and do something you regret.)

Even a really good idea might need to be revised to be updated and made relevant again for a later time; in which case, you run the risk of getting caught up in the same cycle all over again. So avoid that cycle and just do it! And the more you do it, the more you build that muscle of confidence and the ability to create and go. Create content AS you go, as the experts do.

You have my 5 incredibly simple time management tips to follow – now use them to your advantage and make something today!

5 (Stupidly) Simple Time Management Tips