Times a Wastin"

I remember my Grandmother using that phrase years ago. At the time I didn’t understand what she meant. Years later I realized she was talking about just letting time slip by and not having anything to show for the time spent. Over the years I’ve come to call activities that rob us of our time “timewasters.” When we control these activities we enhance our ability to be productive and make good use of our time.

First, most of us have a tendency to spread ourselves too thin. We often try to do too much and end up with unfinished tasks. We must learn to set priorities in order to get the important tasks of the day completed.

Secondly, and related is the need to learn to delegate. It isn’t necessary ( or even possible) for us to do everything ourselves. We can have things done by others. This frees up time for our most important tasks and also develops confidence in those working with us.

Next, many of us find it very hard to say no. We get over our heads and spin our wheels at all our activities. No can be the most important word we have. It is important to do what we must do, the important items. After this we should then do what we want to do. After these two we should say no to other requests.

Still another time waster is being tied to the phone. One only need go to the store or a public activity and find people seemingly permanently attached to a cell phone. These are great tools, used properly, of communication. However, I suspect not all calls are of important nature and thus timewasters. A friend of mine bunches his calls and has a time each day to respond. The rest of his business day he works effectively and organizes his important tasks.

Our final timewaster is procrastination. We visited about this one earlier. Most of us never conquer the big P, we just win small battles from time to time. My limited success with procrastination has been to do unpleasant tasks first and to divide large jobs into smaller pieces and get bits completed, thus gaining momentum to complete the project. In reality few of us will totally control all five timewasters all the time. As we seriously work at these we improve our performance and develop habits that enable us to make use of our time more and more effectively. Then we have more time for work and leisure.