Time Management For Dummies - Identifying The Ten Biggest Time Wasters
The time thief is everywhere. Without even realizing it, time wasting is happening to us all. How many hours a week do you watch the television? How many times do you log into your inbox each day? How many minutes are wasted on phone calls that are not important? Too many, I bet. These examples are obvious time wasters, but some can be subtle, so hidden in amongst our daily life that we don’t even know they are there, causing us to waste more of that valuable resource - time.
A time waster is any activity that doesn’t make a worthwhile contribution to the work at hand or to the goal you are trying to achieve. Often you will drift into a time wasting activity without even realizing it. Some of the time, you’ll find yourself doing an activity knowingly but really not wanting to be doing it at all!
Identifying your biggest time wasters can seem like a time wasting activity in itself. Do you want to spend all day, all week recording your activities? Do you really want to know what you’ve been up to? Probably not, but the first step to effective time management is to identify the ten biggest time wasters in your day.
There will be some time wasters that appear on everyone’s list. Poor planning, procrastination and interruptions are troublesome to everyone. If you can identify those that waste the most time, you can then work toward eliminating them. Identifying the biggest time wasters will depend on what you do. If you are in the corporate world, meetings may be at the top of your ‘ten biggest time wasters’ list. Students might say chat rooms come in first whereas homemakers might regard phone calls or unannounced visitors as terrible time wasters. Below is a list of common time wasters. Do any (or all) of them relate to you?
Poor planning
Meetings
Procrastination
Interruptions - telephone
Interruptions - personal visitors
Tasks you should have delegated
Sporadic dealing with correspondence
Staff management
Poor communication
Unclear objectives and priorities
Stress
Inability to say "No"
Disorganization
Cluttered desk
Often stopping and asking yourself if you really want to be doing a certain task, will be a good way of identifying it as a time waster or not. Is there something else you could be doing instead of that activity? Something that is more productive or more enjoyable? If there is, then that activity is wasting your time. It is not helping you focus on the task at hand.
Once you’ve identified the time wasters, you can rank them in order, from one to ten, in reference to how much time they take away from what you want to achieve. And then you can go about the task of eliminating them.
So are you ready to identify your ten biggest time wasters? If so it’s time to track your daily activities and discover where all that precious time is going.
Get free organizing tips and expert advice for every area of your life — at OnlineOrganizing.com!
Leave a Comment