CBT Time Management Worksheets
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Therapists can use CBT time management worksheets to help clients create realistic expectations, and reduce stress, anxiety, and feelings of failure.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a solution-oriented approach to therapy. It provides practical solutions to improve symptoms of mental health conditions like anxiety and depression—and it can help instill better habits for time management.
In this article, you’ll find an overview of how CBT time management worksheets can help with time management, different techniques to use with clients, and a free, downloadable time management worksheet PDF to save to your electronic health record (EHR).
What are some issues clients face with time management?
People lead busy lives full of stressors, such as juggling full-time work and parenting, attending graduate school while trying to manage financial commitments, or the worry caused by imminent exams. These demands can lead people to feel overwhelmed and like they never have enough time.
This overwhelm is typically caused by several factors:
- Overcommitting to demands by underestimating capacity
- Economic and systemic barriers that leave clients with little choice but to spin many plates to keep food on their tables
- Poor time management
Time management is a multifaceted issue. According to researchers, an individual’s use of time is influenced by behavioral and psychological components, including:
- Time value: Including social and personal orientation.
- Time control: This includes goal setting, prioritizing, planning, time allocation, and feedback.
- Time efficacy: Time management efficacy, including behavioral effectiveness.
Some clients may face additional barriers to successful time management, like clients with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Individuals with ADHD may value their time and be a great planner, but this condition can complicate time efficiency due to symptoms like procrastination, being easily distracted, executive dysfunction, time blindness, and feeling easily overwhelmed.
Fortunately, tools like neurodivergent-friendly CBT time management worksheets can help everyone strengthen their time management skills.
CBT techniques for time management
By applying practical solutions and techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, clients can improve their time management skills for:
- Documenting tasks
- Prioritization
- Resources allocation
- Capacity planning and preventing overbooking
- Reducing procrastination
By approaching time management using CBT tools, clients can begin to feel more focused and less distracted.
Here are several CBT worksheet examples that can be used with clients to strengthen their time management skills:
Identifying time wasting
This technique can be used as a time management worksheet for adults or teens.
The client simply notes down everything they do in a day without judgment.
For example, when waking, do they pick up their phone and check social media, or read the news for 30 minutes before getting out of bed?
Do notifications on their phone prompt them to stop work and pick up their phone? Perhaps friends or family members call them at different times and interrupt their flow of work.
Clients may also feel like they must attend all meetings they are invited to and may be able to strengthen their discernment skills and see opportunities for delegation.
For people with ADHD, it is very easy to get sidelined by constant distractions, like email notifications, colleagues stopping by their office, or phone calls. In instances like these, it may be helpful to ask clients to also note down how long it takes to get back on track.
Noting down everything they do in a day gives the client and you a better idea of what takes up most of their time and ways they may be able to work more efficiently.
Make a plan
While making a plan isn’t specifically a CBT technique, the questions you ask about the plan can have a cognitive and restructuring component.
With this technique, ask the client to make a plan at the end of the day with what they want to accomplish the next day. Once they’ve made a list, suggest they allocate time to each task, then order the tasks in priority.
Clients may find it helpful to ask themselves if all tasks are a priority and if they have enough time to complete everything in a day. They may also benefit from a prompt to add time for breaks, reading and responding to emails, and checking their phone.
You could provide a CBT activity schedule template so clients can visualize exactly how much they are trying to achieve, if they are overcommitting themselves, and whether they are underestimating how long each task takes.
Reduce procrastination through planning
Procrastination happens for many reasons, such as feeling overwhelmed by a challenging task, demand avoidance, executive dysfunction, or feeling like the task carries little reward.
You can tackle procrastination with clients by helping them find motivation to complete the task and breaking it down into manageable chunks. We’ve included a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this in our downloadable CBT time management worksheet PDF.
How to use the CBT time management worksheet
Our CBT time management worksheet can be used in several ways:
- As a prompt or handout in session to work through time-management related challenges.
- To use as a visual whiteboard activity for virtual solution-oriented therapy.
- As a homework log.
- To create a time management worksheet for students, who often feel overwhelmed by papers and studying for finals.
- An opportunity to provide psychoeducation about the components of effective time management.
- As a visual tool to enhance client awareness of how much time they’re spending on distracting activities, or how they are overcommitting their time and underestimating their capacity.
The free CBT time management worksheet PDF includes three time management techniques for adults and students struggling with their time: reward-based motivation, identifying time wasting, and planning.
Sources
- Wang P, Wang X. (2018). Effect of time management training on anxiety, depression, and sleep quality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6379615/
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