I spent the last week on a canoe tour to Angel Falls. Spectacular place. Incredibly remote and it gave me time to think through some of the things that have been troubling me lately.
The week previously I had monitored my time spent on different activities. I timed everything. The results were shocking.
I am an efficient person. I train and coach people on how to improve their efficiency but over time a bad habit had surfaced. While my work time efficiency was OK with just a few ammendments needed, my non-work time had fallen apart. I clocked almost 2 hours a day reading online newspapers. I am not including here work related magazines and blogs I read to keep up to date. This was totally straight newspapers with no work or hobby benefit at all. 2 hours a day!!
I was shocked by this. How had it happened? I have quite a lot of hobbies (I play guitar, write, draw cartoons and other things) but I had developed a habit of idly surfing newspapers between other activities. Slowly this grew in time until so much of my day was wasted in this way. Not only that but I found myself thinking about what I had read (usually quite banal stuff) and this occupied my time even more.
So what did I do?
I found the WasteNoTime app and blocked myself from all these sites. The effect this week has been amazing. I have so much more time.
Are you also wasting your time in a similar way? Spend a week timing your activities from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. Use a stop watch that you set everytime you change activity. Note down the activity and the time spent on it. Include everything.
Chances are there is some waste hding in your habits. Maybe one will stand out like my newspaper reading but if not ask yourself whether the amount of time you spend on a certain activity is appropriate. Is it worth it?
Your small improvement for today is to time all your activities from the time you wake up to when you go to bed. What does it show?