This Quiz Will Tell You If You’re Managing Your Time Efficiently

QUESTION:

How Well Do You Manage Your Time?

YOUR ROUTINE 

1. What’s your typical morning before going into your business? 

a. Drag self out of bed, wince at the time, gulp down the instant coffee, dash out the door. 
b. 20 minutes of exercise, 15 minutes of meditation and goal setting, 15 minutes at breakfast table with kids speaking about the day ahead.
c. Hit snooze button, repeat, hit snooze button, repeat, hit snooze button …
d. Fold up the portable cot in the back office where another “late night at the shop” came to a close.

2. How much do you sleep at night? 

a. Eight hours, without fail. 
b. From six to eight hours.
c. From two to 10 hours.
d. Don’t sleep. Power nap.

3. This tax season did you… 

a. Dump everything on the accountant on April 18.
b. Play a furious game of catch-up, with sleepless nights and fits of rage.
c. Tally up your well-kept records from the fiscal year.
d. Send your returns in two months before the deadline.

YOUR HABITS  

4. How do you generally handle multiple tasks and responsibilities? 

a. I prioritize thoroughly, give my full attention to the first item on the list, then move on to the second item, and so on.
b. I do the stuff I enjoy most first, then the stuff I like next best. In this manner, the stuff that I really don’t like doing just seems to sort of go away.
c. I try to be flexible in my priorities, spending most of my time on the most urgent tasks, but not leaving the less urgent stuff completely unattended.
d. I get paralyzed by the workload and wind up letting everything slide.

5. You have a big deadline one month from now. How do you handle it? 

a. Take it easy until there’s a week or so left, then turn it up. I work best under pressure.
b. Break the project down into little increments, with daily/weekly milestones that have to be met.
c. Let things slide until two days before the deadline, then spend the last 48 hours working frantically without sleep. I can only work under pressure.
d. Start working on it right away. If I get close to deadline, I know I’ll fall apart.

6. When it comes to tasks are you a “to-do” list-maker? 

a. Let’s put it this way – making “to-do” lists is the first item on my lifelong “to-do” list.
b. Never – it’s all in my head, man!
c. Sure, when it’s appropriate.
d. Only when I’m facing a really daunting workload.

HYPOTHETICALS 

7. You missed a deadline on a job for a client and there’s no way to make it up. What do you do? 

a. Finish the job anyway, to prove to myself and the customer I finish what I start.
b. Grovel. Plead. Do anything to make the customer change their mind.
c. Move on without guilt – there’s nothing I can do about it now.
d. Move on with guilt – why do I keep missing deadlines?

8. It takes you 30 minutes a day to do a certain task in your business, and it would take you roughly a full day or more to train one of your staff to do it instead. What’s your course of action? 

a. Keep doing it myself. Who’s got two days to waste on training?
b. Let the employee watch me do the job until they think they can do it, however long that takes.
c. Just hand over the job and let the employee figure it out … that’s how I learned how to do it, anyway.
d. Find the day-and-a-half for training in our schedules, train the staff member, provide them with a written guide to the process, and check in on a regular basis to see how they’re handling the duty.
 
9. Today is the day you’re finally going to work on the text for your new website. What do you do? 

a. Go to work. Close the door to my office. Fire up the computer and decide to check my email “for just a second.” Click on the link to the funny Instagram Reel my friend sent me. Four hours later, leave the office having watched 120 more Instagram Reels.
b. Go to work. Close the door to my office. Turn off every program except for my word processing program. It’s just me and my words. Don’t stop writing until all stories for website are completed.
c. Go to work. Do my usual duties, while making sure I carry a notepad to write ideas for website copy as they pop up throughout the day. At the end of the day, I type out the notes I’ve taken and polish them a bit. But there’s no need to finish – I still have four weeks until the text for my new website is due.
d. Work for half an hour before getting stuck. Walk around for an hour and a half. Work for another half-hour. Stuck again. Walk around for another hour and a half. Repeat until next week.

YOUR PHILOSOPHY 

10. Time is … 

a. Scarce.
b. A magazine.
c. A resource, and like all other resources, must be managed carefully.
d. My mortal enemy.

SCORING  

 
1. a. 2 points; b. 3 points; c. 0 points; d. 1 point
2. a. 3 points; b. 2 points; c. 0 points; d. 1 point
3. a. 0 points; b. 1 point; c. 2 points; d. 3 points
4. a. 3 points; b. 1 point; c. 2 points; d. 0 points
5. a. 1 point; b. 3 points; c. 0 points; d. 2 points
6. a. 3 points; b. 0 points; c. 2 points; d. 1 point
7. a. 3 points; b. 0 points; c. 1 point; d. 2 points
8. a. 0 points; b. 2 points; c. 1 point; d. 3 points
9. a. 0 points; b. 2 points; c. 3 points; d. 1 point
10. a. 2 points; b. 1 point; c. 3 points; d. 0 points

YOUR SCORE 

0-8. Took you three tries to finish this quiz after getting distracted, didn’t it? Or worse, this is the second time you’re reading your score because you forgot you did the quiz last week. Either way, you’re a mess when it comes to budgeting your time. 

9-16. You’re not hopeless. But you’re probably not sleeping as much as you should. Your work and your private life may suffer from a lack of attention. Find time in your frantic day to draw up a schedule you can live with. Prioritize with “to-do” lists and follow through on them. Delegate tasks you can’t handle on your own.

17-25. You’re an organized person with time for both family and business, and you’re flexible enough to move on when you can’t control certain events. Good work!

26-30. You manage your time well, but you might want to be careful of managing it too well. Learn to go with the flow once in a while when things don’t go exactly as you planned. Resist the urge to map out every minute of every day.