Wasted Time

As an ongoing little project, I am trying to identify where time gets lost. It is quite impressive, how easily hours get squandered away without doing much or getting accomplished anything to write home about.

Here are some things I have found:

• Reading the news. Quick check if the world is still (not) OK. Ten minutes gone, easily. Any new catastrophe I should worry about, wow, spent another 15 minutes. And so on! I believe it is important to be informed about what is going on in the world, but frankly, the interval at which I (used to) check the news is quite disturbing. Reading the paper once as a day is more than good enough. Daily savings: 30 minutes.
• Scanning through and deleting emails that are not relevant. The solution here was to implement a set of rules that automatically process incoming emails (my inbox is now always empty, feels good!). Took about three hours to set up and refine, but now I can much more easily batch process the important emails. Time saved daily (less distraction): 15 minutes.
• Dropping things and not putting them away when I used them. It is easy for me to think that I am too busy in the moment to clean up stuff that I have used (files, electronics, paperwork, tools). The problem with this approach is that I am in essence borrowing future time, which often resulted in hours of sorting and cleaning up things. I am working on becoming very diligent about putting things away immediately when I have used them. Time saved daily (less searching, lower stress due to less clutter): 20 minutes.

So... few small (but surprisingly hard!) behavioral changes gave me more than an hour per day! Perhaps this inspires you to think about your day and where time gets wasted. Curious to learn what your insights are, please leave your thoughts below in the comment section.

Take care,

Flavio