How much did you put in today to achieve your life's dream or goal? How much time did you put it into yesterday and how much time have you put into it over the last month. Chances are, if you've come to this blog, you know you are not achieving the full potential out of yourself and you could actually put a lot more time into achieving the novel you want to write, the business you want to create or the promotion you want to get.
In this post I've identified key time wasting activities that if abolished from our daily lives, have the potential to free up a massive amount of time. Spotting these time wasting activities, eradicating them and filling the time with useful activities is key to achieving a great amount of success and getting through the workload that comes with it.
10 Time Wasting Activities
Internet :
Even I can be a slave to this one. I hear many people say that they often log onto facebook or twitter, and forty five minutes later they realise they haven't actually done anything.
Whether you are browsing the news channels, catching up on your social media or just surfing the web, you can waste hours of your day on pointless exercises. Try to give yourself a limit of fifteen minutes a day on social media sites, or only allow yourself to check the news headlines during your lunch break. If this is hard to do, use your parental control devices on your browser and ban the time wasting sites all together. Although you will know your password, having to put it in will at least make you think about what you are going to achieve by going on the site.
Television:
I cannot see a bigger waste of time than sitting in front of the box. The average American watches 153hours of TV a month. That's over six days of TV, which is nearly a week just sat in front of a box, not achieving anything.
Imagine gaining a week of your life back, how much can you achieve in six days! Start by not allowing yourself to watch TV during the weekdays. Anything you really must watch, you can record and watch at later date when it's suitable for you. Instead of watching TV, dedicate that time solely to achieving your goal, whether it's setting up a business, or writing your novel. If you have six days of writing a novel every month, you could easily have it finished by the end of two months.
Telephone:
There is no bigger distraction than a mobile phone going off when you're in a meeting or getting on with some work. Ignore it! It's very rarely more important that the thing you are doing now yet we automatically put the person ringing us first.
Change your answerphone message to this. "Sorry, I'm too busy to answer the phone right, please leave a message and I will aim to call you back within three working days. If it is urgent, please email me and I will reply at the nearest opportunity"
Nine times out of ten a conversation that can last ten to fifteen minutes could actually have been dealt in a two minute email reply. If it's important you can ring them back, and if it isn't important, they won't bother leaving a message.
Computer Games:
Whilst they are fun to play, and help you relax after a hard days work, they can often take over peoples lives. Set yourself a time limit on the computer or games console. Remember games are there to entertain you and help you relax on your time off. When the games themselves become your ambition, you start to waste a lot of life.
Worrying:
Worrying causes us to be indecisive and prevents us from taking the first steps into achieving our life's ambitions. Try to imagine your life in ten years. What would you tell yourself to do? The answer will either be, go for it or, it's a stupid idea and you know it. Chances are, if you are dreaming of achieving something, and you've thought about it for a long time, it's not going to be a stupid idea, so what are you waiting for. Life is long enough to rectify mistakes but it will run past you if you don't take the opportunity to do something now.
Commuting:
The UK has the longest commute time in Europe, boasting 45minutes a day. This adds up to a day a month just travelling. If you are able to, work out what jobs you can get done whilst on the commute. If you can afford it, hire a driver. You may see this as an expense at first, but if you work out how much you can earn in a day, and how much a driver would cost for a day, and what you can earn is higher than the price of a driver... it makes sense to get a driver.
Hobbies:
It's great to have hobbies, and whilst I would never say cut them out all together, a lot of people spend far too much time on their hobbies. If you are one of those people that obsesses about your football team, or has to play guitar every second of the day, try to schedule in two or three hours a week. Failing that, why not make your hobby, your job. That's what I did and now I get to do all the things I love doing, all the time and get paid for it.
Meetings:
Don't get me started on meetings. Donald Trump says that a meeting shouldn't have to last longer than fifteen minutes and I have to agree. Meetings are disruptive, unproductive and mostly irrelevant to the goals you are trying to achieve, whether that's at work or elsewhere in your life. If you can't get across your point in fifteen minutes, chances are, you don't really have a point.
Next time someone asks you to come to a meeting, ask them what it is about, assess whether it's important, and if it is, tell them that you can spare fifteen minutes for them and explain that you have important work that has a tight deadline. A good boss will appreciate your time management and if it's not important, they may tell you that you don't need to be part of it.
Daydreaming:
There is a big difference between dreaming and visualising. Next time you catch yourself daydreaming, pick up a pen and paper and write down the daydream. Then write down a couple of actions you need to do to achieve what you are dreaming about and schedule those actions in. Now it's not a daydream but a few steps towards achieving something. Now you can stop daydreaming about it and get on with some work!
Planning:
Or more the lack of it. It is one thing to say you want to achieve something during the day, week or month and it's another actually scheduling it. Take five minutes at the start of your day to write a to do list. Work out how long each task will take and schedule it in for the day. Firstly, you are more likely to do something if you've scheduled it in, and secondly, you will realise that some tasks won't take as long as you imagine they will.
Planning like any skill, you will get better at. You will start to get a good instinct of how long things will take, their importance and being able to schedule things in a way that is more efficient and enables you to achieve. There will be more posts about this!
Hopefully, for the majority of these activities, you can see where waste the day doing them. If you total the amount of time you think you waste in an average day doing these activities, you may have some alarming results! Cutting pointless activities out and scheduling in more important tasks will help you make the most of your time, impress the people around you with your productivity and put you well on your way to achieving the big goals in your life.
FM
