We all waste time at work sometimes, and usually a little time wasted does no harm. However, I literally have no time to waste. I get two full days to work, period, each week. I’m a single work-at-home mama, who homeschools, so time is tight. My son’s dad has our son Friday evenings through Sunday evenings which is when I do the bulk of my work – that by the way means; I try to get everything done for the upcoming week (currently about 3 articles and enough posts for around 10 blogs). It’s near impossible. Actually it is impossible. I’ve never, not once, had a week where I get it all done on the weekend.
Partly, this is because I’m working with a small amount of time, but also I waste some of my time. Last week I made a list of all the ways I waste time.
- Not knowing what to blog about first.
- Email, or should I say EMAIL!
- Moderating and responding to blog comments.
- Breaks during work hours.
- Getting side tracked while posting.
- Forums.
- Sleep, meals, and exercise.
- Twitter.
Some of these problems are larger than others. I also jotted down some solutions, including some solutions directly related me only having two days to work in the first place.
Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting my solutions – and how they’re working. I put some into motion this weekend. If you’re wasting time in the same ways that I do, or if you’re a single work-at-home parent maybe my solutions will help you to improve your productivity too.
What ways are you wasting time during work hours?
My biggest time wasters are email, my blog reader (the worst for me), and Twitter is a growing problem.
Email is probably the biggest time waster for me too. My feed reader is growing but manageable at the moment.
I tend to scribble notes to myself during the week when something comes up for ideas for blogging, so I don’t usually get stuck for ideas on what to write. For example, yesterday I attended a BNI meeting in the morning and got ideas for 2 posts and then a church meeting last night prompted another idea. I keep a notepad and pen with me always as ideas can hit me any time!
Twitter – I don’t yet really understand that, so it’s not a distraction for me… yet.
My feed blogs aren’t a big time waster (and I have like 300) because I only keep blogs related to work (i.e. blogs I write) in there. News, pr stuff, and so fourth. I don’t linger at my feeds, just cruse through looking for stories. The blogs I enjoy reading that aren’t related to work, I keep in my personal blog blogroll, and they actually can be a problem. I forgot that.
Philosophically I have a difficult understanding or should I agreeing with the wasting-time mentality where we beat our selves up.
Not that in hindsight I haven’t wished I had taken a different approach to undertaking and completing some tasks for time to time.
The concern I do have is that sometimes I think we are becoming a little to robotic in our approach to completing the never-ending tasks that we give ourselves.
There are some tasks that are definitely important such a providing food and shelter for our kids and taking care of family and friends, but the rest of our tasks are self imposed.
I do waste time, sometimes I have been know to sit on a park bench and do nothing but looking around.. Now how wasteful is that. (grin)
We do need down time and what others might call wasted time doing all sorts of trivial and what may appear at first glance as unimportant, but does help us to understand life and may lead to new discoveries.
If some task does not directly impact my health, safety and well-being, pretty broad categories, then it is not a high priority task and can therefore slip or even not be completed.
At work were we do tend to be task driven I have a philosophy that if there are some tasks that can’t become completed because there are many more important ones then I am working at maximum efficiency as in truth not all tasks need to be completed or even by me.
If I were to spend a couple of hours talking to a stranger on a park bench this is not wasted time but investment time as I will never the opportunities or new ideas that could spring up form that conversation and let alone the joyous feeling I get when I connect with people.
In summary stay happy, don’t beat your self up, it’s a journey and all parts are important to our well being.
Niels Henriksen
Well, true we shouldn’t beat ourselves up. However, for me, during work hours, spending time doing things other than work would be detrimental to my son’s well-being. The less I work efficiently, the less money I make. The less money I make, the less easy our lives get. Blogging is a weird job in that it’s often semi-based on page views which is related to amount of work you get done (often).
Also, the more efficiently I work during work hours the more free time I have the rest of the time, because then my work time won’t overflow into said free time. To me blogging is a high priority task, it’s how I make a living, so it has to be.
That pesky sleep & eat thing just gets me everytime!!!