Many people complain about the lack of time they have in their lives. “Never enough hours in the day!” That may be true, but it may also be true that you’re not using your time well. It isn’t so much that we don’t have enough hours in the day. It’s more that we often waste so much time that we just don’t have enough.
There’s nothing more precious than time – not even money. You can always make more money, but you can never earn more time. Therefore, if you want to make the most out of life, you want to focus on ensuring you are using your time effectively.
Consider some of these time-wasters, and if you can, eliminate them from your week.
1. Jumping back and forth between activities.
Multitasking is a common buzzword in productivity spaces. To get as much done as possible, you need to multitask! Right? Well, actually no. As Brown University Health informs us, the brain isn’t designed for multitasking. It’s designed for monotasking. Multitasking can disrupt your ability and deprive you of the flow state. A flow state is something that comes when you stay in the zone and keep working on the project in front of you.
Think about times in your life where you’ve been focused on something, making good progress, and then someone interrupted you and messed up your mojo. That is what is happening constantly when you’re multitasking. Instead, if you focused on one task at a time, you would get them done much faster. Easier said than done for many, I know.
2. Doing low-energy tasks during your high-energy times.
There’s a surprising amount of peace in learning to roll with how your brain functions. That is, many people waste the time of day when they are most effective. The time when their mind is the sharpest, clearest, and they can dedicate the most focus to getting something done. It’s easy to waste that time if you’re not aware of it.
There are optimal times to get things done during your day. Instead, you may find yourself mindlessly doom-scrolling or binge-watching shows during your most productive times. That’s definitely a waste of time and energy, because then you’ll be trying to get harder work done at times when you’re not performing as well. Then, you have to spend more time going back and correcting your mistakes.
Of course, each person is different, and your optimal time will differ from others. That’s why it’s crucial to observe your capacity, your mood, and your energy to figure out when your brain is functioning at its peak.
3. Overthinking small or unimportant decisions.
Nothing quite kills your time and enjoyment of life more than overthinking, which about anyone with anxiety can relate to. This is a behavior that is good to disrupt or try to minimize, both in general and in relation to decision making, because there comes a point where you just can’t find anything new to think about a subject. You don’t want to keep searching after that.
Not only that, but you run into the issue where overthinking isn’t necessarily helpful. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. Unfortunately, in a lot of situations, you get to learn what you don’t know when it smacks you in the face. You just have to rest assured that you are capable enough to handle future problems.
4. Engaging in busywork, or fixing things that aren’t broken.
I can safely say I know this behavior well, myself. I used to be in the bad habit of trying to make working things “run better” even though they were working just fine. Instead of focusing on something else, I would continuously go back, tweak, adjust, and try to make it “better” in whatever way I thought I was improving it.
Turns out that’s not necessary, like 95% of the time. Yes, I may be able to make something more effective or efficient, or I could also break it by messing with it. Most things aren’t so important that they need to be hyper-optimized. In fact, it’s often good enough so long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Then you can move on to something else.
5. Ruminating on past conversations or experiences.
Rumination is when you sit around and think about mistakes you made in the past for no productive reason. Now, it’s worthwhile to pause and think about past mistakes so you can learn from them and grow. However, sometimes you may find yourself dwelling on past losses, just kicking yourself over and over for how you handled the situation.
That is a tremendous waste of time and energy. You can’t change the past. There’s no point in dwelling in it once you figure out where you went wrong. All that does is waste valuable time that you could be using to have a happier present and future.
Of course, it’s not as simple as just deciding not to ruminate anymore, but it’s definitely worth learning some techniques to help you stop, or at least reduce rumination, for both your productivity and your mental health.
6. Attending meetings or functions that don’t require you.
There sure are a lot of people who are more than happy to take up or volunteer your time. Sometimes, you want to stop and question whether or not you actually want or need to be there, though. For example, if you have a lot of meetings at work that aren’t important, it may be better to try to skip them to focus on your work.
Similarly, if you have family or friends who like to volunteer you for things without consulting you, you definitely need a boundary there. Everything you say “yes” to should be something you’re willing to sacrifice your time and energy for. Keeping yourself drowning in busywork all the time will just exhaust you and make it harder for you to function.
7. Quick “checks” that aren’t quick or that don’t actually need checking.
Small, “quick” checks create unnecessary work and disrupt your overall flow. For example, consider checking your email. It may not seem like it’s a big deal to check your email off and on throughout the day, but it eats up more time than you may realize. Touching back on multitasking and disrupting your flow, every time you’re thinking about checking your email, the weather, sports scores, or messages, you’re distracting yourself.
Then, after you’ve distracted yourself from whatever you were doing before, you have to spend the time doing the check. Maybe that’s replying to a long email, which will take more time. Then, when you’re done with that, you have to transition back into whatever activity you doing before that. It takes time for your brain to fully switch from task to task, and that time adds up.
8. Having a mental “to-do” list rather than a written one.
Sit down and write out your tasks and responsibilities for the day. That way, you’re only taking the time to think about these things once, rather than reminding yourself all day. It’s a waste of time to constantly be thinking of what you need to be doing and when. And when you inevitably forget something, because your memory isn’t limitless, that steals even more time from you because you’ve disrupted what you have going on, and need to shift your attention.
Just write it down. It’ll help you stay organized throughout your day. There are some people who also do a weekly checklist, which can be helpful. They sit down at the start of the week, identify what they need to accomplish that week, and lay out a course of action ahead of time. That allows them to maximize their time with minimal adjustments.
9. Waiting for the “perfect time” to get started.
Let me save you a whole lot of headache, heartache, and anticipatory anxiety: there is no perfect time to get started on anything. You are losing so much time if you’re waiting until all of the factors that you think you need to succeed are in perfect alignment. The world just doesn’t work that way. It keeps turning whether you’re ready or not.
Instead, you have to be willing to jump in and do the work. As a writer, one of my pet peeves is “inspiration.” So many artists are waiting for inspiration instead of just doing the work. But here’s the thing: you can always go back and edit. You can’t edit a blank page, though. Doing the work is also a source of inspiration in itself, because sometimes you find a spark in the work that you’re doing.
Final thoughts…
We often have more hours in our day than we realize, because we are wasting too much time. All of these minor things add up throughout the week, stealing valuable time away that you could be using for something better for yourself. Maybe it’s time to rest, to spend time with loved ones, or to practice a hobby.
Reclaim your time by looking for time-wasters and eliminating the excess from your schedule. Give your tasks the appropriate amount of time they need to complete them, and then no more. That will free up more time than you may realize.
