5 Key Strategies for Time Management and Stress Management

Time management is about making the best use of time. Stress management is about managing your emotional health, mental peace and performing without being overwhelmed. The two are connected because sometimes when things don’t go as per time, missed deadlines have an impact. These potential impacts immediately cause stress making us think about the ramifications of not doing things on time.

Time Management and Stress Management

In a simplistic view – if we manage time well, we, therefore, can manage the stress better. Things however are not that simple. Stress can have a more dominant presence i.e. Time management is a subset of stress management. It is a tool to be able to manage stress better. Hence, it is valuable to focus on managing your stress. It is an efficiency vs effectiveness debate. Efficiency is about doing things right. Whereas effectiveness is about ensuring that we are doing the right things

Efficiency is doing things right, Effectiveness is doing the right things – Peter Drucker

So, in this article, we’ll focus on managing stress and how time management can. contribute to it.

5 Strategies for Time and Stress Management

Time and stress are closely related. In fact stress management is more important than managing time alone – in the sections below we will talk about managing stress and time to give us the best chance of success.

Managing Expectations

The first and most important thing about time management and stress management is about setting clear expectations. Stress comes from the fact that we are not meeting expectations whether they are set by ourselves or someone else. The moment we don’t meet the expectaitons, we immediately start thinking about its impact, related losses etc. In order to manage stress better, start with setting clear expectations. Avoid optimism and try to set realistic targets. If you are able to achieve more, it is great. But don’t underdeliver from what you’ve promised or else it will impact every other dependent work causing a ripple effect, thus compromising trust on your abilities.

Even if expectations are not flattering, it is a great way to reduce stress by keeping them as real as possible

Plan, measure and adapt

We all know this – a good plan is one of the best ways to ensure that things get done. However, the most common mistake in planning is that people make plans at the start and forget them. They check these plans only at the end to see that things have changed and they are not in control anymore. A good plan gives visibility for everyone involved. It tells how to measure success or identifies milestone to know if you’re going in the right direction. It will also have some buffer time to repair for unforeseen situations or complex challenges. These plans will not be perfect, but they give you a good chance to map your thought process.

When you create a plan, make sure that you share it with people involved. It helps them understand when you miss milestones and adjust their plans accordingly. The worst part for them is when you can’t deliver and inform them of incompletion at the end. Imagine the amount of stress it creates to them. Visibility of your plan, measures of success are a great way to know how far off you are from the final outcome. Even if you fail, you know that the impact of this failure is smaller than failing on everything – thus reducing its accompanied stress.

Don’t procrastinate

This is related to both stress and time management. Things will not be easier or better tomorrow. In fact, they always get worse as you’re squeezed for time. The best thing you can do at any circumstance is to take action. Even if you are not able to complete the entire task, make a plan – complete small parts of it. This is better than keeping it all for the end.

Towards the end, it feels overwhelming and even if you’re able to finish on time, the quality of output is compromised. At such stressed circumstances, even if we put extra hours, the quality will not be good because your mind needs its space. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that procrastination will make things easier.

Don’t try to do everything by yourself

This is one of the worst ways of managing things. No individual is as powerful as a team of focused people. Use different strategies of time management to identify what can be delegated or delayed. Be smart about time management strategies – use frameworks such as Eisenhower Matrix, 4D’s of time management to give you the best chance of achieving the final outcome. No one cares about a perfect failure. Sometimes a good enough outcome surpasses a perfect half measured outcome.

And if you suffer from perfectionism – complete the first full draft and then update. Even in the worst case, you will have something to submit as a completed document without compromising the final outcome for someone else. Thus the pressure or stress in situation will be about improving the qualtiy rather than missing the deadline altogether.

Schedule breaks

The efficiency metric sometimes will tell us to reduce breaks and keep going. This may work for short term projects, but for the longer projects – you need breaks to energise and destress you. Your practices and habits must be sustainable so that you can repeat success. One off victories are great, but they are boring when you can’t repeat them. Well timed breaks give you the time and space to motivate yourself and sustain the energy to complete. If you don’t take breaks, you’re looking at an eventual burnout. In such a case, even if you manage time properly and complete things, you’d have still lost because you’d have broken yourself for something less important.

These are our key points about time and stress management. We can identify more strategies and frameworks to extend these practices into nuances. However, the principles remain the same. Stress management overarches time management and it stems from good practices and habits