The waste of your time is usually common on a daily basis, therefore, it is important to have a method that allows you to recognize them and stop or avoid them in case they appear, which is usually much more common than you think.
The most frequent wastes of your time;
– Interruptions are usually the most common waste of time and are produced by any person or situation that you do not have control or organized, and often produced by ourselves.
Normally to get a good productivity of our time we can organize our list of tasks, but we should also have a list of interruptions that occur, and value our time making those interruptions can occur as little as possible.
If they occur because there are people who think they can interrupt your time when they consider it or because there is a person that your time is more important than yours, be tough with this situation, you just have to report and when they try to use your time at a time that does not interest you, give them some guidelines or a protocol to work with you. It can be sending what they want to tell you by email or similar.
But don’t let anyone take your time with interruptions, because whoever does it once does it a thousand times. And it does not mean that he takes your time in a rude way, it can be in a very polite and respectful way, but it is still an interruption
And it is also important that you show that just as you ask for respect for your time, you also have respect for the time of others, and do not make interruptions to others, and if you can use the same protocol that you ask others, perfect.
– Improvisations, if anything takes up your time, it can be improvisations. I have seen this first hand for example in the different sales networks that I directed and trained, in certain sales networks there are great improvisers, people with an enormous capacity to give a solution to a problem at the moment, and that is very important, but also very dangerous. For your time to be 100% effective, you have to reduce improvisations as much as possible, and you can use them effectively at the right time.
Planning is the tool that allows you to eliminate improvisation, and also by planning things well you can guide your teams in the right way, making their time very effective for you and also very effective time for themselves. If you don’t plan everything depends only on you and it is very difficult for your team to follow you, making both your time and their time a worse and worse value.
– Unproductive meetings, One of the ways you have to recognize them is when you have a meeting in which there is not a clear and defined objective for the meeting, when all the people who will attend are not indicated or when a specific maximum time is not established for them or when you realize that what was discussed in previous meetings has not had results or concrete actions in which the decisions that were taken in those meetings have been materialized.
If you can decide whether or not to attend, it is important that you ask before the meeting what the specific objectives of the meeting are and that you are also informed of who will attend.
When you attend, use each of the meetings as if it were an option to make your time increase its productivity, making business opportunities or action in each of them, in this way you will get your productivity of your time is very high.
If you call the meetings think about the productivity of others, the meetings have to be highly productive at all times and the duration you should raise it in the minimum possible time, it is also good that you indicate to everyone that the meeting will last a maximum of 30 minutes, that way, everyone will also be responsible for arriving on time.
– The time lost with television, If there is something that makes time a huge waste of time is television, especially lately the news, which broadcast the same information of minimal interest and is also already in hundreds of online newspapers, but especially do not get hooked by programs that are sold as entertainment, but do not contribute anything to your personal or professional goals, these programs really bring little value, television is something you should have very controlled and devote the time you have planned for it, the rest is directly lost time and in the trash.
– The dispersion that the Internet can generate, If there is something that can generate a huge dispersion that is the Internet, you can spend 10 hours surfing and keep discovering things over and over again, it is important to make your work on the Internet, and more now that the Internet is present everywhere to be as productive as possible, your time has to be devoted to what is really interesting.
One way to make your time very productive is to work with a database of very well-organized favorites, having a clear which are the ones you have to use in your daily work and the ones you have found useful or interesting but do not have a daily use, so you will optimize your time in a considerable way
– Excessive use of email, Email is a tool that must be used intelligently, you can not have it plugged in all day, and the time it can take away from your day-to-day can be gigantic. Most CEOs who manage to build important companies use their email between 1 and 2 times a day and dedicate a maximum of time to answer those that are of interest to them of between 20 and 30 minutes each time they access.
– The phone and the time it wastes, The truth is that thanks to WhatsApp the phone is no longer used in a meaningless way, now What is used meaninglessly is whatsapp, but if you want to make your time valuable use WhatsApp in the same way you should use email, answering at the time you think you should do it and without interrupting another call.
The phone is one of the things you have to use intelligently, in short, direct conversations, and to solve things, not to waste time. Keep in mind that if something gives you the feeling of activity that is very false is the phone, it seems that you have been doing something and in reality, you have been wasting time, so it is important to be very clear when using it in conversations, if a conversation lasts more than 10 minutes make sure it is a conversation in which you are getting that the productivity of your time is multiplied by 1,000