Watch Out for Time Wasters!

Have a three thousand word essay to turn in tomorrow? Your expense report is overdue? You haven’t made time for cleaning your house? And why is your pizza not there yet? A common denominator to these questions is time. Yes, time, the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. It’s the one thing we all battle with, in some way or another.  In the words of William Shakespeare, “defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.”, and dangerous ends they are.

If any of the aforementioned questions apply to your life, it’s probably consequence of time being wasted. And who isn’t guilty of this crime anyways? I’ve sat many a days in front of my laptop with a blank word document minimized and about 10 tabs open, none being a research topic relevant to the reason for opening said laptop in the first place. The world just becomes more interesting when I have something pressing to do, seriously. Like, did you know Sir Christopher Lee besides being an actor and knight, is also Dracula, actually met Tolkien himself, served WWII, and at age 91 releases heavy metal albums rocking out the lead vocals. This dude is awesome.

You’re going to Google him now right? Am I wasting your time? Now you sort of feel like you’re indeed wasting your time reading an article on time wasting instead of doing what you should be doing, right? Don’t feel bad! Distractions are sometimes necessary but wasting time does become a habit, and a nasty one may I add.

There are many ways to waste time whether you’re doing homework, you’re at your job, or you’re simply putting annoying chores aside. To fix your problem with time wasting, first you must recognize your main time wasters.

I searched around for some and along with my own, a few common time wasters are:

1. Distractions, which include all social media, internet surfing, television, the hot neighbor watering the lawn right outside your window, etc.

2. Multitasking, because sometimes doing more than one thing at a time results in doing nothing with your time.

3. Instant messaging/texting, self-explanatory.

4. Other people, which are distractions as well in the form of chatty co workers, annoying bosses, or simple flesh obstacles.

5. Being messy and untidy, because searching for that important phone number you wrote down on the back of a receipt will take you 20 minutes to find.

6. Lack of time-off, or time for yourself. Not having a lunch break or enough sleep will result in future unproductiveness.

7. Lack of planning or foresight, because you know you have stuff to do and a specific time frame to do it, so you should plan and foresee what could possibly distract you.

8. Daydreaming, simply drifting off out of boredom or spacing out just because.

Now what we need is a solution and internet gives you a whole bunch of them. From daily/hourly planning, meditation to goal setting but for all you procrastinators and daydreamers, I’ve found a common solution for your woes. It’s called focus and lucky enough, there’s an article on that here. As long as you focus on what the problem is, on the elimination of said problem and on the completion of your task, you’ll take advantage of your time successfully.  To get stuff done needs effort and effort needs time. So sometimes time needs time and surely you need FOCUS to wrap your mind around this.

A wise quote for you, time waster!

“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say ‘I don’t want to.’” – Lao Tzu

 

About the author: Michelle Smith is a blogger, internet surfer, science and astrophysics enthusiast, dog lover, tourism major, avid reader, coffee addict, prose writer, music-eater and chocolate cake aficionado. A little bit of everything packed into one human form with a wild capacity of thinking too many things at once. Follow Michelle on Twitter @Shells1901 or check out her blog, Missing Pieces of Myself for an unfiltered peek of her personality.