How to Stop Wasting Time

It is easy to waste time scroll through social media on your phone. It is painful and perhaps enjoyable to binge Netflix. The challenge is that if done during your peak performance hours, those when you are most focused, you might be burning the most productive hours of your day. It is not that you can not do these things, it is that you should do them during certain hours.

They deplete time. Forget the to-do list. Create a schedule, and stick to it as much as possible. This process will help you prioritize your tasks and stay on track. Instead of putting things on an endless to-do list, put the tasks you need to do on the calendar. By blocking off time to answer emails and write a document, you will ensure it gets done because you save uninterrupted time to focus on these tasks.

Turn off notifications on your phone and silence those notifications as well. Categorize your goals. Make a list of goals for the day, week, and month. That will help you prioritize what to focus on during that time. Batch similar tasks. Switching between different tasks is exceptionally distracting and challenging to refocus. To avoid this, consider grouping similar tasks, such as answering emails or making phone calls.

Too often, time is wasted on status updates which could easily be converted to an email.

Meetings should include adding new perspectives, troubleshooting, and figuring out how to scale. If the goal is dialogue, there should be a meeting. Otherwise, ask yourself if anyone would notice if you were not. Breaks are critical. Sitting in front of the computer for three hours will be counter-productive. While you may get into a state of flow, when you are incredibly productive, appropriately challenged, and happiest, you will be completely exhausted after three hours and unproductive for the rest of the day.

Consider working in sprints and taking short breaks throughout. Step away from your computer and allow your mind to drift. This work-and-break cycle is known as the Pomodoro Technique. Most people cannot identify what perfect would look like, so they can never reach it. Forget perfection. It is unattainable. Instead, figure out what is needed to be acceptable, and focus on doing it 5%-10% better than everyone else.

Compounded, you will stand out as someone who consistently delivers outstanding work products. Say no before you say yes. Whenever you say yes to a task, you are saying no to something else, usually yourself. Politely decline the offer if it does not align with your goals or mission. Focus on what only you can do. Sure, you might be able to do the task better than everyone else, but if you do everything, you will not accomplish the big tasks that only you are uniquely qualified to do.

If you have someone you can delegate to, consider doing so.

By doing this, they can build their skills as well. It is easy to be distracted in today’s ‘always on’ world. Actively putting breaks in place to help you avoid distractions might make you more productive and less exhausted. We are guilty of wasting time. In fact, one survey found that a whopping 89% of employees admitted that they waste time at work every day.

Not that that is always a bad thing, wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering. There is a thin line between good and bad wasting of time, however. Unplugging and recharging, building relationships, learning a new skill, and hobbies are good time wasters. Bad wasting time would be doing trivial and unproductive tasks. Other bad wastes of time are activities where nothing is learned or procrastinating when you should not.

Simply put, wasting time can be beneficial when you need to recharge.