Time is one of the most common resources for everybody. As any other resource, it is limited and in most cases poorly managed. In any person’s activity, time stands for a variable in the equation. Most of us loose around three hours a day, without realizing how those hours were spent. This “loss” is not intended or conscious. If it were like that, it would be easy to correct it. The time loses are due, in most cases, to unhealthy habits. For example, it’s almost a rule that easy tasks are solved first and more difficult tasks are left for the end of the day. Or you start working on something, you are interrupted, forget what it was all about and start with something else, this way risking not to finish anything in due time.
I will enumerate below some time thieves (of course all these would differ from one activity to another, the list is open):
- People who come into your office without a real purpose; it’s not impolite, if you are really busy to say so
- Not keeping an agenda; this makes you lose your temper in the evening when you realize you neglected some very important tasks during the day
- The inability to delegate; if you have subordinates, teach them how to help you
- The tendency to leave everything to the last moment; you will lose control over your time and your co-workers’ time, becoming yourself a time thief
- The impossibility to say NO; you have to learn to say NO, otherwise you will find yourself overwhelmed by useless activities, risking to put in danger the things that are really important to you
- Information or notes that are incomplete; after a half an hour discussion with a client over the phone, you realize after hanging up that you didn’t find out what the client needed, and so you have to get back to the source and find out the pieces of information that are still missing.
Below you can find a top 5 time thieves inside X3:
- The waiting line in front of the microwave oven at noon
- People who forget things - you are waiting for a critical answer on a subject, and after a couple of hours of waiting, you find out that the person forgot about you
- Not the people you join for a smoke break, but those who smoke their cigarette all the way to the filter
- People who come into your office because they are bored, and in the end they bore you too
- People from any shop who can’t decide what they want to buy, creating without exception a waiting line behind them
Note: my colleagues declared my email on this subject a time thief.
The solution as I see it, is not working over the clock, during the lunch break or during the weekend … the efficiency curve is usually low in all of these cases. The solution is to set your objectives by the book, to have healthy habits, to keep your agenda up to date to help your poor memory, and try to eliminate time thieves. I’m not talking here about becoming just a busy bee, but about making the best use of your own time.
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