By Kenneth Horsfall
Poor time management is something that is always seen with creatives and many small businesses especially here in Nigeria where everything is demanding for the time from traffic jams to business meetings and a whole lot more.
What is poor time management?
Poor Time management is the inability of planning and exercising conscious control of the time spent on specific activities to work smarter than harder.
As creatives and small business owners if you don’t manage your time property it will result in poor time management and the implications of poor time management are enormous and include.
- Procrastination
Procrastination is the most obvious result of poor time management. Creatives or small business owners who don’t have control over their time end up letting tasks sit until the last minute – and then they feel a lot of stress when they try to play catch up. If you’ve let too many tasks sit, you might miss deadlines entirely.
2. Lack Of Priorities and Focus
The biggest single time-management problem for most people is their lack of priorities and focus. It’s even worse when there aren’t clear goals to follow. If a creative or small business owner allows themselves to be distracted by numerous unimportant tasks, they can end up wasting a lot of time. For example, getting distracted by every new email or starting one task after another without finishing anything.
Most creatives have more work to do than could be completed in one day or even one week. If you don’t know how to effectively manage your time, you can rapidly start to feel overwhelmed. If that’s happening to you, the best thing you can do is focus on the one most important task you have.
Then, you can feel like you have achieved something and met a deadline. However, you’ll most likely need to leap straight into the next crisis to meet another deadline, never having enough time to get ahead of the curve. Getting proactive about your work can greatly help you meet all your deadlines early.
Sometimes the issue is that a lot of creatives and small business owners won’t delegate other tasks that they really should they want to do everything themself. Small business owners, in particular, can be guilty of this. You must delegate when appropriate. Then you can focus on the tasks where you can add the most value. This results in higher quality work from everyone involved.
3. Missed Deadlines
If you are currently exhibiting poor time management skills, you will likely miss deadlines. This can have drastic effects on your work performance. It will also affect many of your colleagues who may suffer from fallout. Perhaps you are late for meetings, miss calls, or anything else that delays work getting done. This affects much more than just you and your role. Anyone who is always unprepared can cause issues for everyone else. It wastes the time of people who have prepared their own work. Make sure you do anything in your power to not miss deadlines.
4. Unprofessionalism
Missed deadlines show that there is a serious lack of respect and professionalism. This will surely impact the career of the person in question. It can also act as a demotivator for the team because no one wants to put the work in only to fail because of someone else. This effect is worsened if the person with poor time management is their manager. More widely, unprofessionalism can lower the good reputation of the organization. Any client would be upset if you missed a deadline related to their project.
5. Financial Implications
Deadlines being missed can come at a huge cost for the company. Without proper time management training, deadlines may be missed time and time again. As an example, if you create products for a shipment leaving the next day, the shipment goes whether or not you’ve filled it up. The cost of this can be massive. These conflicts can make your client relationships suffer as well as you having to lose out on profit.
6. Damaged Customer Relationships
One of the biggest time management problems is that when we produce low quality work at the last minute, our clients are sure to notice. They will no longer be happy with the service and may choose to go with another provider.
This loses the company money but also tarnishes its reputation. It’s even worse when you have contracts with the client, but it includes a service level agreement. If you don’t meet this, you may have to pay.
Ending Thoughts
We spend countless hours over our lives doing things that are of little benefit to us. If you could add this time up and see how many hours of this you waste each month, you would be shocked.
Time management issues can create countless conflicts in business. Lost finances, negative relationships, and missing deadlines are serious matters.
A creative or small business owner with poor time management may end up losing jobs.
It’s not all bad news, however!
Whether we’re talking about creatives or small business owners, time management can be helped by some fantastic software.
Kenneth Horsfall is the creative director and founder of K.S. Kennysoft Studios Production Ltd, fondly called Kennysoft STUDIOs. Kennysoft STUDIOs is a Nigerian Video and Animation Production Studio. He is also the founder and lead instructor at Kennysoft Film Academy and can be reached via [email protected]