Money worries can bleed into every part of your life. When you’re anxious about finances, you might agonize over every spending decision. You lie awake running through numbers in your mind and worrying about all the what-ifs. You get frozen or overwhelmed or more easily distracted than usual. There’s plenty of research out there confirming that financial anxiety can take a major toll on you physically and mentally, but it’s something most of us have probably experienced for ourselves.
Time worries can feel a lot like money worries, right? When you’re constantly short on time and not getting everything done that you want to get done, you might wrestle with the same kind of overwhelmed anxiety.
Focusing on good time management can help quiet your anxiety about other things (like money).
It makes sense that anxiety about money and anxiety about time can feel so similar. Time and money are both limited resources that we all constantly need but can’t completely control. You feel guilty for wasting them, and anxious when they’re in short supply.
Let’s talk more about the control piece of this, and how it ties into time management.
A big part of what makes people so anxious in a shaky economy is how little control any of us has about what happens with our financial systems. Things feel unpredictable. Right now, no one’s really sure about what the stock market is going to look like in a few months. Even if you work incredibly hard, you can’t control how much your investments are going to be worth or how much things are going to cost.
It feels hard to plan ahead when so much is unsettled and uncertain.
- Should you splurge on the big vacation?
- Should you invest in that new equipment for your business?
- What are your clients and your team going to want and need in six months, or a year?
If you’re feeling anxiety and overwhelm like that, taking action can help. Maximizing your time is one of the first places to look if you want to make immediate, positive change in your life.
4 Reasons to Focus on Good Time Management When You Have Financial Anxiety:
1. Using your time effectively gives you free time outside of working hours to decompress and do things that relieve your stress rather than add to it. Having a solid plan for your day and a clear sense of your peak priorities lets you get the most important stuff done during your work day so you’re able to clock out at a reasonable time without guilt.
2. Good time management strategies help you maximize your resources, and potentially even save some money. How? It depends. Maybe you save some cash on childcare or pet care because you don’t have to put in those extra weekend hours at work. Or, reorganizing your weekly plans lets you spend less time driving around from meeting to meeting, so you save money on gas and take-out. Little changes add up. And, being really intentional about how you use your resources in one area tends to make you think about resourcefulness in other areas, too.
3. Working productively and moving your business forward through difficult circumstances reminds you just how resilient you are… and sets you up for whatever’s next. Remember the stress of the early days of the pandemic? It was hard to stay engaged with day-to-day work or big-picture planning. There was so much to worry about and so much uncertainty about the future. But within a few years, we had returned to something that looked pretty close to the “normal” world. Just because you’re experiencing a lot of anxiety at one moment in time doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way forever. Staying in relationship to your goals and working on activities related to your peak priorities keeps you and your business moving toward those big goals. When things get a little easier in the future, you’ll be glad you maintained momentum through the stressful times.
4. Sometimes it feels good to take control of the things you can control. Granted, this can go too far in a destructive way! But in terms of time management and productivity, “taking control” really just means: having a system in place allows you to manage your time with intention, rather than constantly feeling rushed and over-scheduled. If you can reach that baseline and mostly get a grip on your time, you’ll feel more rested and able to handle whatever else the world throws at you.
Equip yourself with the time management tools that work for your specific brain and your specific life.
As I often say, everyone’s wired differently. The time management “hacks” that you read about online won’t necessarily work for you. Or, they could work for you… but you don’t actually know to implement them. Putting new strategies into practice is where a lot of people stall out.
I’m here to walk you through the actual, step-by-step process of creating daily and weekly plans that let you get everything handled. Join me on May 22nd for Weekly Planning That Works. Unlike some trainings, this one is going to be a working session—meaning you’ll leave this masterclass with a plan to follow. In the 90-minute course, I’ll lead you through my Weekly Planning That Works process. You’ll have time to work on each step and ask questions along the way. Enrollment also gets you a follow-up Q&A session with me where we can talk about your progress and troubleshoot as needed.
Register now for just $97 and start to get relief from all the time challenges that are adding to your stress. Click here for more information and to register for the Weekly Planning That Works masterclass.
Be well,
Sarah
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