Lets fight our time wasters!!
by Manu Sondhi
(India)
Write down your time wasters - what are the activities you do during the day which act as time wasters rather than helping you to be more effective.
Also, write down what are the things you can do to fight/overcome their time waters.
Once you have identified your time wasters and how to overcome them, start to implement it.
Kell’s Reply: What a great way to tackle time wasters Manu.
Whether it is procrastination, ineffective meetings, a lack of focus, or other common time wasters, having knowledge of what you waste your time on is the first step to dealing with the time waster.
For example, one of the biggest time wasters for me was constantly checking my emails. Heck, my Inbox was almost my default screen.
If I was working on something, every time an email arrived the little icon at the bottom would tell me that I have mail and of course I would open the email.
This was a problem as I would get interrupted – and it takes a good few minutes to regain focus again.
Of course I knew that constantly checking email was a problem for me. So what I did was to turn my alerts off and then schedule my email checking time.
This gets back to what you were talking about Manu, if you have knowledge of time wasters that affect you then it is possible to implement strategies to overcome them.
While I talked about constantly checking email as my own timewaster, probably the biggest time thieves that face business today are:
- procrastination and multiple handling (for example checking and rechecking email)
- ineffective meetings that either run too long, don’t tackle the important issues, or could be managed with an effective agenda
- a lack of focus and constant interruptions which are becoming the norm as companies move, more and more, to open plan offices.