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Time and stress are always closely tied together. Most of your stress will likely come from you being worried about not finishing your work on time, and that same stress will likely delay you even further, which ends up becoming a vicious cycle that leaves you stressed out and without much work done.

It can be frustrating for you, your coworkers, and your clients. To avoid all of this, you need to master some proper time management skills in order to give yourself enough time to get your projects done easily, and to avoid a scenario in which you’re overly stressed out.

When you’re stressed out because you don’t feel like you have enough time to complete a project, the logical thing to do would be to get to work. However, that rarely ends up being the case.

Chances are, if you’re stressed out about work, you’ll find ways to distract yourself so that you feel better in the mere short term, while in the long term you’re going to be making things much worse for yourself.

There are all kinds of excuses that you’ll see yourself come up with. You might claim that you’re distracting yourself to be more creative for a bit or to get yourself feeling better so that you can then work more efficiently.

Even if that’s true, chances are high that you’re going to be spending more time than you’re saving, leading to you having even less time to actually complete your project. With time management skills, you can avoid this situation altogether, because it’s difficult to get out of once you’re in it.

First, you can carefully plan out your project’s schedule and how long it’s going to take you to do it. Don’t cut corners at this stage – you need to be completely honest. If you claim that a part of your work will only take 30 minutes, because that’s the fastest you can do it, don’t count on that.

If there’s a chance it’ll take you two hours, budget for that to take you two hours. If you end up taking less time, that’s great. However, if you do take up that much time, you’ll have already accounted for it, so you won’t be playing catch-up.

You need to also cut out any time distractions to see how much of your time is being spent on things that aren’t work. You’d be surprised how quickly time can fly when you’re watching shows online or scrolling through social media. That time could be better spent getting ahead in your work or catching up if that’s what you need to do.