What things do steal our precious time from us? Apart from external time eaters (which are beyond our influence), there are many personal ones which actually make us the robbers of our own time. These time eaters lurk in our personalities and individual qualities which hinder the job, leading to stresses and the realization of lagging behind. Obviously, you have to get rid of these, but this is going to be tougher than fighting the external killers. Our personal impediments are part of our life. Changing personal habits takes time, but everyone can do it.
Among personal time-eaters are:
- Inability to resist and say NO;
- Habit of trying to do everything simultaneously;
- Poor evaluation of time and scope of work;
- Desire to be always useful and helping for others;
- Inborn sluggishness;
- Never keeping tracks;
- Too much of talking;
- Reluctance to set dead lines for assignment/job;
- Getting down to job without making sure all means for doing it are handy;
- Inability to pick priorities;
- Habit of checking e-mail every 5-10 minutes (blogs, forums, RSS) or other Internet surfing;
- Social networks, chats and IM;
- Habit of playing computer games or watching TV;
- Getting not enough rest (that constant sleepy and run down condition);
- Habit of relying on memory;
- Inborn absent-mindedness;
- Habit of putting off everyday tasks to the end of working day;
- Inability to track the progress of a project;
- Smoking habit.
That’s quite a list, isn’t it? There are many time eaters which come crashing down on us from the outside, too. If your co-worker comes over to you to chat, you obviously can’t interrupt him mid-sentence and send him doing his job because that would be unkind of you, so you sit there listening.
We don’t consider such moments as the part of working process. But let’s just imagine how much time you waste brewing coffee or fetching new package of office paper. Wasted minutes accumulate and the day passes by.
Could we get rid of time-eaters? Yes, we can and we have to. But first you need to realize they exist and they are strong. The realization of how much time external and personal time eaters take from you would help to deal with them effectively.
So let’s find more of them together to complete our time eaters list.
Source of the image: flickr.com/photos/cobalt.
