Are you looking to beef up your time management skills?

The good news is you don’t have to make great changes to your work habits to make a difference.

In this post I offer three small, yet powerful time management tweaks you can apply right away in your life.

Know when your emotions are entering the time management picture.

Do you set out to accomplish a giant product launch project at work or try to paint the entire interior of your home in one day and then feel bad for not completing everything in one fell swoop? Take a moment to consider whether your timeline is realistic or is clouded by your emotions.

Are you extremely eager or excited to complete the project? Perhaps it could just be you are ticked off at having to do something you really don’t want to do and want to get it over and done with ASAP. That’s totally fine! Stop punishing yourself either way, and start making better solutions instead.

Try spacing out a project calmly over the course of several days or weeks, ask for aid or assistance, or perhaps just flat-out delegate a task or assignment to someone else.

Avoid always filling up your schedule when it’s empty.

You’ve got a giant space open in your calendar next Thursday afternoon. What are you going to do? Fill it with back to back appointments, meetings or work, or what? Just because you have a blank slot in your schedule doesn’t mean you have to fill it. How many times do you wish you had a bit of a reprieve in your schedule, a break, a chance to catch your breath?

Part of time management is dealing with the ebb and flow of schedules. Sometimes things are busy and sometimes things are calm. It’s all part of the process of time.

Remember, you don’t have to go out of your way to fill up an empty schedule. Why not claim that time for your own and use it as you see fit? Things will become busy again soon enough, so why not take that break?

Don’t squeeze things into your schedule when you know they won’t fit.

Ever hear the old saying of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? The same applies to your schedule.

Problems arise when you have a certain amount of time to complete a task or errand (say 10 minutes) and then insist you can complete a 30 minute task in that time frame. Sorry to break it to you, but it probably won’t happen!

Check yourself the next time you think you can squeeze in something into a space of time you know won’t work.

How about you? What time habit do you have that you’d like to correct? Join in the conversation and leave a comment below!