Life is short.
Don’t we all wish we can maximize the effectiveness of every minute we spend? In order to do that, it is critically important to identify the time wasting habits in our lives, the little seemingly harmless activities that are actually sucking time from us without our knowledge. These are the activities that cause you to wonder at the end of the day, where has all my time gone to?
The first step to correcting your time wasting habits, like all bad habits, is to identify where you have gone wrong. To that end, I urge you to try out this little experiment for a day.
Prepare a pen and a piece of paper tonight, to put by your bedside. When you wake up tomorrow morning, the experiment starts, and at the end of every hour or at intervals that better fit your schedule, note down in your notepad what you have done for the past hour.
Make this time log as detailed as possible, indicating exactly how many minutes you spend on each activity in the day. Make every minute accountable.
At the end of the day, before you go to bed, evaluate that piece of paper, and you will be amazed at how little time you actually spent on work or activities you have intended to carry out! What happened?
Look closer, and you will realize how much time you have actually spent in checking your emails, daydreaming, walking to and fro your desk, fetching drinks, replying unnecessary phone calls, gossiping, spinning your pen on your desk, deciding what to eat for lunch, and a whole bunch of other non-work related activities.
And then you will probably be so excited at this newfound knowledge that you get addicted to this activity, and at the end of a week, you would have got a firm grasp on how to identify your time wasting habits.
Then and only then, would you be able to change your habits and watch them slowly disappear from your time logs, and finally start having more fruitful and effective days!
So start today, start now, identify your time wasting habits and begin your journey towards a more fulfilling way of life!