Hina Javed Malik
As soon as the clock strikes 3:00 PM, you realize you are not nearly as far down on your to-do list as you thought would be. You ask yourself who is stealing your time? But let’s get real because no matter how real you are, the only person sapping your productivity is you. Sometimes, you unknowingly start following a routine where you mindlessly waste very precious minutes of every day. These are the apparently seemingly harmless habits that distract you from your work and leave you scrambling to catch up on your to-do list.
Following are the few habits that unknowingly waste your time but by becoming aware of them, you can replace them with good habits:
Attending unimportant meetings:
In the workplace, most of the time gets wasted on attending meetings that are often pointless. Whenever you are asked to attend a meeting, understand why it is important for you. If you are an executive, first decide whether scheduling a meeting would be beneficial for you or your team members or not. If significant changes are not seen, then do not attend such meetings and pay attention to the work that is pending.
Replying the incoming messages:
Email is one of the biggest time wasters and you do it on daily basis without having any guilt. The impulse to check emails and reply to them instantly distracts you a lot from your actual work. According to experts, you must set a specific time for checking emails and fight the urge to reply to each and every single one.
Delaying the wake-up time:
Another thing that wastes a lot of your time is hitting the snooze button in order to get five to ten minutes of sleep. Studies have proved that this approach brings more harm to an individual than good. Sleeping in short increments is the worst because you are neither able to get into deep sleep nor you can wake up and do anything. This wastes a lot of your time which can be put to some good use otherwise.
Looking for misplaced stuff:
Studies have revealed that 60 percent of people get to work late because they keep on searching for lost items such as keys, phones, wallets, glasses, etc. Just because of this hunt for misplaced items, almost 40 percent of the people miss their appointments and 22 percent miss their flights, trains, or buses. Instead, if you make sure to return an item to its place every time you take it, you will surely save a lot of your precious time.
Prioritizing the to-do list:
It is very often that you waste a lot of your time deciding what you need to do first. Prioritizing your to-do list does sound like a productivity enhancer but it is basically an energy-draining exercise because you waste a lot of time deciding rather than executing. Therefore, before you leave for work, decide one thing that needs to be done and then your mornings will become more productive.
