Is Your Tax Personality Also Your Time Management Personality?

by | Blog, Productivity, Time Management

Is Your Tax Personality Also Your Time Management Personality?
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What’s your tax filing personality?  

Are you the ASAP tax filer? You log into TurboTax or call your tax preparer the day you receive all your documents? 

Are you the on-time filer, meaning you usually get your taxes wrapped up at least a few days or weeks before the deadline?  

Or, are you a tax procrastinator? You wait until the last minute, then scramble to pull everything together to get it done and end up needed a tax extension. 

If you’re a tax procrastinator, you’re certainly not alone. A company called IPX1031 recently reported that 31% percent of respondents said they procrastinate taxes.  

Is the way you handle filing your taxes also how you handle time management around other long-term projects?  

First, a caveat: if your partner handles your taxes and you don’t do them yourself, be honest with how it would go if you were filing them on your own. 

If you’re an ASAP filer, does that style reflect how you handle other projects?  Are you hyper organized, always planning ahead, and good at tackling projects head-on?  (That said, even these folks can struggle with time management and staying consistently on track with long-term projects.) If so, are there types of projects that you don’t handle that way? 

If you’re an on-time filer, you’re probably pretty good at prioritizing the most important projects. Even when things get busy in the day to day, you stay on top of the long-term stuff. You stay in relationship to your big goals. 

If you’re one of those tax procrastinators, is it fair to say that you approach other long-term projects in a similar way? You know you need to get to them, but keep putting them off anyway. Then, when you can’t push them off any further, panic sets in. Here’s what you end up doing:

  • Scramble when you can’t push tasks off any further
  • Pull all-nighters
  • Send SOS emails to contacts who can help
  • Cancel social plans
  • Drink way too much coffee
  • Feel steeped with shame and anger at yourself
  • Basically, sacrifice your well-being until the project is done

Long-term projects and last-minute planning are a bad mix for your productivity and your mental health.  

Don’t you have enough stress in your life already? Aren’t you already hard enough on yourself? Scrambling at the last minute to get things done, while kicking yourself for not having started earlier, is just not a habit that’s likely serving you well. And it’s probably not helping you do your very best work on those big projects and goals. By racing at the last minute, your focus becomes on getting it done—not on enjoying the process, doing it thoughtfully, or being proud of the outcome.   

It’s fitting to talk about procrastinating on long-term goals at this particular time of year. By April, a lot of people have lost track of their yearly goals. They’ve either totally forgotten about their plan to complete a new certification or start their own podcast or launch a new business strategy. Or, they just haven’t gotten around to getting started yet.  

The IRS controls the timeline with taxes. With your yearly goals and long-term projects, controlling the timeline is up to you. That flexibility becomes restrictive when you don’t have good time management strategies and planning structures in place. You can tell yourself you’ll get to that project when things calm down in the day-to-day and you have some free time. You’ll even mean for that to be true. But things won’t calm down in the day-to-day. Time will get away from you like it always does. Either you’ll have to abandon that project, or become totally burned out by the last-minute scramble to get it done.  

Break the cycle before it breaks you! 

Three Steps for Tackling Long-Term Projects Productively Without Burnout 

1) Get control of your daily and weekly plans.

You can’t maximize your productivity and overall well-being if you don’t have a handle on your time. Period. You’ll waste hours and hours of your work week on inefficiency and overwhelm instead of actually doing the tasks that most need to get done. You need templates for daily and weekly plans in place that actually work for your brain and your business. Start by getting clear about the most important things that need to get done each day and prioritize those tasks. Over time, you’ll be able to stay on top of your daily workload, and learn to carve out time to make steady progress on long-term projects.   

2) Break steps into steps (and into more steps).

A lot of people procrastinate their taxes because it all just seems too daunting to get started. That same kind of overwhelm can stop you from digging into other big long-term projects. Working backward to break the final goal into a series of smaller steps gives you an entry point so you can start making progress and building momentum. Start with the smallest, simplest step.  

Let’s say you’ve decided to start a podcast. It sounds like a great challenge, but you have no idea where to start. So maybe the first steps become: learning about getting started with podcasting. That objective can be broken down further into steps like: researching the best resources for learning how to start a podcast, and reaching out to your network to find out if you have any contacts who have done it before and could give you advice. Now you have a simple starting point that begins with going through your contacts and seeing who you know that has a podcast. As you get into the project and start to understand all the components that go into achieving your goal, you’ll be able to break them down into next steps as well.  

3) Build those next steps into your plans for the week ahead.

Scheduling time into every week to work on long-term projects keeps you in relationship to those goals and the momentum going – avoiding the “out of sight, out of mind” problem that procrastinators are always struggling with.  

Need more help with time management and productivity?

I know so many folks are struggling right now. All of the economic changes and insecurity makes it tough to get focused and move things forward. I get it and I want to help you navigate these tough times with time management tools and strategies that can ease some of your work-related stress and help you focus.

So, I’ve decided to offer my five-week Jump Start Your Productivity program on a deep discount to make it more accessible to the folks who need this kind of support the most.

Use the code JUMPNOW at checkout you’ll save 50%! <<< Click here for more information and to sign up. >>>

There’s a lot you can’t control right now, but you can learn to control your time. 

Be well,  

Sarah 

Sarah Reiff-Hekking
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