Seems to be busy always, break your time habits

Let’s accept the fact that being busy is the easiest thing nowadays. It is easy to take up many random talks or involve in chatting with friends, endless coffee meetings, going through FB, IG or WhatsApp feeds, or shopping sites, etc and before we know it would have taken hours.

The unfortunate truth is that many of our time management errors are entirely our own doing. We simply decide to use our time in ways that aren’t optimal – we choose easy, interesting, and fun over productive and laborious.

What is the result of all this? We are less productive and find always lack of time to do the things we really want and which gives us positive energy!

I recently read the book The Now Habit, from Neil Fiore. In the book, there are some amazing strategies given to get over unproductive time. I am listing from the same and hope you will find it useful. Though I would recommend at any time to buy the book and read.

Show me the unproductive use of time

When it comes unproductive use of time, no one can tell other than you. I cannot define what is productive or unproductive for you.

If we have set goals or have clear priorities for the day, a week then it is easier to know if the activities are aligned towards our goals.

If not, then to get a sense of, if we spending our time productivity or not, the best way is to reflect on our own feelings.

One way is to classify the activity as unproductively spent, when post activity, it doesn’t feel good and drains the energy levels.

For example, a few minutes of news read a day is good but if I end up reading news for 30-45 minutes, then post that activity my energy levels would have dropped. I spent my time highly unproductively.

Bad time habits

Being productive is great but many times the very habits we have formed with good intentions earlier can become counterproductive. We are doing things just as a routine without seeing how they are helping us.

We tend to simply overdo things.

For example, checking e-mails, reading news all seems good if they are done in limits. If not, it forms into a bad habit and wastes not only time but also distracts.

Focusing on trivial things

One of the classic time-wasters is by doing trivial things. We all want to get things done and cherish accomplishment. But in the name of accomplishment, we end up doing small things.

The Pareto law says 80% of our results come from 20% of core activities. Prioritizing is very critical. For example, you have a presentation to make. It is easy to get hooked to doing the niceties, fonts, design and spend hours instead of focusing what is the problem you are addressing and spend time on that

Ask yourself what are those small tasks which you know clearly are not going to add value, but from timewise you seem to spend a lot.

Procrastination

Procrastination is nothing but putting off decisions and actions until the last minute. Everyone seems to have some bit of this. When it comes filing taxes, paying bills, sending that proposal, weekly report, waiting or delaying till the last minute means, you are procrastinating.

Procrastination need not be for things you don’t like to do, it can be also for things you want to do but avoid due to fear of failure or lack of clarity.

Get down to work by breaking time habits

As a first thing, to get out of poor time habits and develop a productive daily routine, we must identify what poor time habits we currently have.

A good time chart of the day, the week is best to know where does your time goes. Do you make the rounds chatting with various colleagues every morning, have 3 rounds of coffee, read all the available e-magazines? Discuss the previous day match, politics, etc.

Whatever the habits, first identify the same and then we must find ways to look for ways to change yourself and your environment to minimize their distraction factor.

There are many apps available or even good old pen and paper is enough. Carry the same and list from morning wakeup your sleep, how your time is spent. This no doubt requires, significant awareness level as it is easy to forget what we did.

Our brain doesn’t store things which are routine and things which are insignificant. For example, you read half an hour news, 3 hours later if you try to remember where you spend the last 4 hours, you don’t recollect.

Because our brain doesn’t find saving in memory routine act of reading 30 minutes news significant. That is why we need to become more aware and record activities as and when it goes.

When it comes to the phone though, there are many smartphone apps which give where time spent on the phone. But here also, identifying unproductive vs productive is a challenge.

You might have opened the phone to read an important article, but soon after that, you will spending time on non-essential things such as reading news, FB, etc.

Else at least every 4 hours or worst-case end of day record the way time is spent. Include the habitual tasks such as time spent on drinking coffee, chatting with friends, etc.

After doing this for 3 to 7 days, it is time to reflect. Ask yourself honestly are you spending time productively. Where do you see the time being spent unproductively? Can you steal those times?

You must be critical. It is easy to justify the time spent of say 45 minutes for lunch, 30 minutes of random browsing, 3 coffee breaks. But when we add up all, we can notice we may be wasting hours on unproductive activities.

Also, it’s not realistic to think one can become 100% productive by focusing on only value activities. However, with good planning, one can limit the free time and make sure we are maximizing the discretionary time.

After identifying the common routines which are stealing productive time, you can make smart goals to overcome these. Call the time efficiency goals and define clearly what 1 to 2 habits you want to focus over the next 30 days to overcome.