5 Unnoticed Ways You're Wasting Time Without You Even Knowing It

We all waste time, so don’t try and kid yourself. Whether you’re a young kid at a temp job trying to relieve your boredom by browsing the Internet or an experienced CEO who can’t focus on what he needs to, time-wasting is painfully common in workplaces all across the U.S. According to recent data, the vast majority of employees know they waste 30 minutes or more every day, with 4 percent wasting half the day or more -- and that’s not accounting for self-reporting biases!

If you’re like most self-driven workers, at this point you’re thinking to yourself, “I believe that, but that’s not me. I’m not the type of person who wastes time.” This is because you don’t waste time deliberately -- unfortunately, most forms of wasting time are sneaky and go beneath your notice until it’s too late to do anything about them. You could be wasting hours every day without even realizing it.

What’s the solution? Raising your self-awareness, tracking down the roots of your time-waste then accounting for and correcting those discrepancies.

1. Rituals
We all have rituals at the office -- small routines that we do every day, some of which are productive and most of which are not. You might circle by the water cooler, making small talk for the first 15 minutes of the day, or you might start out by reading the news for 20 minutes.

While not always a waste of time, the danger here comes in not being conscious of your time spent. Human beings tend to forget individual repetitions of long-term routines (the way you often forget driving home from work), meaning you’re spending this time doing rituals without even realizing what you’re doing. Taking breaks and reading the news aren’t necessarily bad things, but they can put a damper on your total productivity.

2. Distractions
Distractions are a major cause of time loss, and this is well-documented. Most people understand the obvious, superficial distractions that catch their eye in the middle of a project -- for example, you might check Facebook instead of working through that tough problem or shop online between tasks.

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These are easy to identify but tough to beat. Usually, disconnecting from the Internet (or source) and scheduling time for these activities later are good strategies. However, you’re more likely to suffer from distractions you don’t recognize as distractions -- such as answering emails that constantly pop-up or being drawn into an office-wide conversation. Strive for a higher awareness here.

3. Communication
Communication is necessary and, in an ideal world, efficient. The most efficient communicators can use things like emails, meetings and phone calls to actually improve their collective productivity. However, for most of us, these mediums and institutions are ripe with the potential to waste time.

How many times have you received a long-winded email that spent several paragraphs explaining a very simple idea? How many meetings have you attended that didn’t need to be held in the first place? Strive for more efficient communication, and you’ll find yourself with more time that you can spend productively. 

4. Refusal to adapt
People have different reasons for refusing to adapt. Some like their niche and pace and aren’t comfortable changing anything. Others are forward-planning perfectionists who don’t like changing their outlooks or approaches when circumstances change. In any case, refusing to adapt your working style or focus when the situation shifts will cost you dearly in terms of time spent. For example, if you gain new information about a client’s needs for an RFP, you’re better off stopping and readjusting than you are muscling through the proposal and hoping it hits home somehow.

5. Working on the wrong priorities
Let’s say you’ve managed to identify and conquer all the temporal fault points I’ve listed so far. You’re working on tasks that need to be done for 100 percent of your day -- excluding breaks, which are actually important to remaining productive). Are you sure you aren’t wasting time doing the wrong kind of work? Are you burying yourself in unimportant tasks or ones outside your wheelhouse, only to realize at the end of the day that you still have your biggest, most important projects to take care of? If so, you have a prioritization problem. Fortunately, this can be addressed by more proactively categorizing and working through your tasks.

Becoming more productive starts with accepting the harsh truth that you likely waste just as much time as everyone else. Once you recognize that, you can identify the key areas of your work schedule that require improvement and gradually phase them out or improve them. This doesn’t mean you’ll eventually be perfect at managing and spending time -- nobody is -- but you will get a little bit closer to the ideal, and that translates to hours of extra time every week.

The 12 Strategies You Need To Be A More Smarter Productive Worker

Whether you’re in Nigeria, Australia, England, or America; blue-collared, white, or pink, we’ve all got 24-hours to work with. Success comes down to what we’re able to do in those hours. No entrepreneur can keep the sun from setting or add hours to their day, but there are strategies that will help maximize work habits and productivity. 

Here are 10 strategies for efficiency and effectiveness below:

1. Parkinson’s Law

"If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do,"observed Cyril Northcote Parkinson. We’ve all experienced Parkinson's Law. We struggle for a month to finish a project, then magically get it done in the final week. Or, the house is a mess for weeks, then spotless within a few hours of the in-laws showing up.

The law provides great leverage for efficiency: imposing shorter deadlines for a task, or scheduling an earlier meeting. Find the sweet spot for productive hustle. Rushed work can be a recipe for reckless work.

2. Finding your flow

For athletes, it’s called being “in the zone,” where you’re so focused that you're numbed out to any distractions. It’s a state we can all tap into: writers, musicians, and entrepreneurs. 

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi's research is focused on these flow states that optimize our performance by finding that balance between challenge and skill. If the task is too challenging and beyond our skill, then we go into anxiety and frustration, but not challenging enough and we fall into boredom.

Stretch yourself, but don't snap. We're at our most efficient when in the zone.

3. Single-tasking

There’s many compelling cases against multi-tasking. A study found that even folks walking while talking on a cell phone run into people more often and were so distracted, many failed to notice a clown riding a unicycle.

Telling an entrepreneur not to multi-task, however, is like telling a pig to stay out of mud but the truth is, multi-tasking a misnomer better termed “task-switching.” We don't juggle so much as we jump around. The problem is ending up with too many open projects, and spreading yourself too thin. A good quote on scaling back is by Alexander Graham Bell: “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand, the sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

4. The 2-Minute Rule

From David Allen’s Getting Things Done, he explains that the most productive people capitalize on the little windows of time opening up during the day. Having an inventory of two-minute tasks on hand whenever windows appear will increase productivity. Cleaning out the inbox, checking voicemail, approving a request, all in brief openings in the schedule, builds our efficiency muscles and gets the ball rolling for bigger tasks. 

A major cause of procrastination lies in overthinking the next step. Allen says it takes less time to do the action than the time spent thinking about it. 

5. Working to circadian rhythms 

Nerve cells in our brains control our circadian rhythms, which influences sleep-wake cycles, hormone release, emotions and energy levels. Constant operation outside circadian rhythms (e.g. international pilots) creates fatigue.

Efficiency lies in synchronizing specific work with these biological peak times. Dr. Steve Kay says analytical work is best within a couple hours of waking, when the morning rise in body temperature increases blood flow to the brain. 

Alertness slumps after lunch as the digestive process saps energy. This analytical disengagement is the best time for novel and creative thinking, according to Professor Mareike Wieth.

Exercise increases efficiency. Dr Gerard Kennedy notes more Olympic records are broken in the late afternoon than any other time. Muscle strength, lung capacity, eye-hand coordination and joint flexibility peaks between 4pm and 6pm.

Three sweet spots for maximizing your efforts: the morning analytic spike, a creative spike after lunch, and a physical spike in the afternoon.

6. Reverse engineering

Most commonly applied to industrial machinery and computer software, reverse engineering can be applied to different fields, products, and strategies. 

It is disassembling and analyzing the components that make up the whole. Efficiency comes not only with seeing how parts relate, but being able to work on aspects out of order. Tim Ferriss notes his rapid mastering of the tango through deconstructing the dance, and learning the female role along with the male. 

Expert linguists do the same, breaking a language into pieces and having a bird's-eye view of the most common grammatical structures. 

7. The Willpower trinity

Stanford Professor Kelly McGonigal says the key to hitting goals is understanding the three powers of willpower: I will power, I won’tpower, and I want power.

• I "won’t power'' is resisting temptation, such as saying “no” to social media.

• I "will power'' is to choose an alternate behavior -- sending a social, but networking email.

• I "want power'' is remembering your why, your goal, be it expanding your career, business or profits.

Willpower is like a muscle. When we fail to reach goals, it’s due to solely relying on I won’t power, but  we can only say “no” so many times before we crumble. However, bringing in backup, and using all three aspects of willpower, will triple the likelihood of success. Resist, replace, remember.

8. 57 on, 17 off

The entrepreneurial hustle makes breaks non-existent. Recent studies show only one-in-five employees take lunch breaks, despite clear cognitive benefits for our fatigued brains. 

So what’s the perfect work/rest ratio? DeskTime App played Big Brother, monitoring employees’ computer use. They found the most productive 10 percent worked hard for 52 minutes, then took a break for 17. It’s backed by scientists, pointing to the natural rhythms of our attention span. Our brain can focus for up to 90 minutes, then needs roughly 20 minutes of rest. Strategic breaks equals efficient work.

9. Power poses

If it weren’t true, it’d be preposterous to think simply changing your posture affects productivity. Professor Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk highlights the psychosomatic and neurological responses caused by our posture. Taking a high-power pose causes an increase in testosterone (confidence, assertiveness, energy) and a decrease in cortisol (stress, anxiety, nervousness). A confident, testosterone-perked person is much more productive than a cortisol-crippled, stressed person. 

Our brain is wired to respond to certain physiologies. A forced smile will still release endorphins. Pulling yourself out of a figurative slump is as simple as pulling yourself out of a physical slump.

10. Validated progress

A good warning from Eric Ries: “If we’re building the wrong product really efficiently, it’s like we’re driving our car off a cliff and bragging about our awesome gas mileage.” 

Along the same stream of the Sharpe ratio’s risk/return measures in finance, and the “minimum viable product” in the tech world, the strategy is about being calculated and conscious in our efforts, with a flexible, rather than fixed process and goal. It’s being productive and ready to pivot, rather than simply charging full-steam ahead.

A case-in-point is Nick Swinmurn's startup of Zappos. He validated his idea without blowing cash by first going to a shoe store, taking photos and posting them online. When sales came in, he went and bought the shoes. He didn't need to pivot, just perservere.