Originally written May 16, 2022
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There never seems to ever be enough time to accomplish everything we need to get done. Yet there are activities we do every day that continually waste our most precious resource because we have built them into our routine and they have become habit.
In order to unlock more time in our day, we have to take a hard look at what we are doing and how it plays into our daily balance of activities. For me, time sinks usually fall into to a few major categories. Work inefficiencies, pleasure binging, and boredom.
Work Inefficiencies as Time Sinks
Work inefficiencies can definitely eat into our time at the office, or for a lot of us these days, home office (which comes with its own set of challenges). Number one on that list for me is email. Having email open all the time is a massive distraction.
As soon an email shows up in our inbox we immediately think “someone needs me!” We put on our cape and off to the rescue, only to find it was someone across the country hitting reply all to something totally irrelevant to our current task.
Even if we aren’t constantly looking at emails coming in, often times we use it to “feel productive” or procrastinate to avoid the bigger task that we should actually be doing at that time.
To avoid these traps, set aside a time and a set time limit on email and then move on. Responding to a few emails in the morning to start our day can help us feel productive so this is a good time for that. Again at the end of the day allows us to see what has come in, if anything needs our immediate attention, and helps us to plan the next day.
Remember, nobody ever died because they didn’t get an immediate email response from you. In fact, they are probably using email to feel productive as well, so responding to them immediately is just adding more work to their plate and making them feel bad. All kidding aside, keep a limit on email and watch your productivity go up.
For more on organizing emails check out Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Work Week“ or David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”.
Second to email is probably conference calls and meetings. How much time do we waste sitting in meetings we probably don’t need to be in, or worse, meetings without an agenda or real direction.
In Michael Hyatt’s “No Fail Meetings” he says that the first part of having a good meeting is to decide if the meeting is necessary at all. Everyone gets more done when they aren’t in a meeting.
Secondary to deciding if a meeting is necessary would be making sure it has clear direction. If you are running the meeting, make sure an agenda is planned out, topics are given set time limits, and everyone’s time is respected.
If you aren’t in charge of the meeting, sometimes asking the boss if it is necessary for you to attend is a way out of an unproductive situation. Saying something like “I’d really like to accomplish that report today, is it okay if I skip this meeting to work on that?” might help.
Time Sinks At Home
Just like at work, we all have things we want and need to accomplish at home, whether it’s getting the laundry done, tackling that weekend warrior project, or making time for positive relationship development with your family.
Our tendency however is to come home from work and want to zone out. We typically have less structure at home then we do at work and so we often have a near infinite amount of choices for how we spend our time and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. More choices can lead to overwhelm, and ultimately inaction.
I’m not saying we can never take a break, but some “breaks” are more helpful than others. Making a concerted effort to stop and practice mediation for 20 minutes is totally different than doom scrolling to see how many people Donald Trump pissed off today.
Time sinks at home are a bit trickier because we absolutely need to stop and unwind and how we do that varies. Sometimes however, unwinding can turn into something beyond healthy. One way that this has played out for me over the years is watching sports.
Who doesn’t want to sit down and watch a game now and then. I am a huge baseball fan which is a great thing! It’s our national pastime and I grew up playing the game so it connects me to my childhood and those wonderful memories.
That being said, from April (March if you watch spring training) through September if you follow a team, they play virtually every night in a 162 game schedule. Baseball games conservatively last 3 hours. That’s 486 hours during that 6 month time span watching baseball.
Stay with me here, back of the envelope calculation to break that down further. If we are awake for 16 hours out of the day during those 6 months, that’s 2,880 hours. That’s almost 17 percent of our awake time watching baseball. Its more than that if we consider that we are at work for many of those hours, so our baseball time now goes up to almost 30 percent of our home time if we were to watch every game.
Suddenly you start to see why we have “no time” for anything. Follow that up with the fact that if you are passionate about a team, you invest a lot of emotion into how well they do. Eventually what happens is that you don’t get much joy out of it because if the team wins, that is the expected outcome, and if they lose its upsetting and thus a net negative on your well- being.
Apply the above to watching cable news, binge watching seasons of shows on Netflix, etc. and you can find any number of ways to take “winding down” to extremes. This is why I like to have a structure for what I am doing at home to make sure I am building in the creative time I want.
To accomplish this, I started keeping a creative journal which just marks down what I want to do with my time at home and tracks whether or not I did that activity on a certain day. At the end of the month I can tally up to see how many days I spent reading, writing, painting, or learning a new language, all things I truly want to do but “Never had time for.”
Boredom as a Time Sink
Without structure, either at work or at home, we can easily fall into overwhelm with the smorgasbord of choices in front of us and ultimately we do nothing, leading us straight into boredom. This is possibly the most dangerous of all time sinks.
I don’t know about you but the first thing I do when I get board is reach into my pocket and take out the iPhone, open up Facebook or Twitter and start scrolling. Nothing good ever comes of this.
Sure you might see a picture of your sweet grandma, but lately grandma’s been caught into the same social media trap and is peddling unsourced conspiracy theories that are showing up on her feed, which makes you both sad and angry.
In addition, you start to see the highlights of all your friends’ lives who are either getting married, buying houses, introducing new kids into the world, getting job promotions etc, etc.
And here you are sitting on the couch. Scrolling.
This is the typical trap of social media. Between people posting mostly their highlights, and you amassing 500 friends or more, chances are someone is having a good day. As a result, it feels to you like everyone else is passing you by when in reality, the vast majority of your friends are having just as boring of a day as you are, they just aren’t posting about it.
The other reason we scroll is to “catch up on the news of the day.” Social media algorithms are designed to get the most interaction and as a result, what accomplishes this is usually posts that insight anger or strong emotion.
You start reading negative or controversial news stories, which by design show up the most in your feed, or worse, THE COMMENTS on these stories and boom you are sucked in. Before you know it you have lost all faith in humanity and your mental health is decidedly worse than before you were just bored and decided to open up social media on your phone.
This one is hard to combat because it’s so easy. One way to do this is to delete the apps on your phone for a while, or at least bury them in a folder that’s hard to get to. This way you really have to make a more decisive choice to open it and leaves you more time to recognize and break the cycle.
James Clear says that he goes to more extreme measures by having his assistant change his social media passwords each week, and then at the end of the week he is allowed to have them until Sunday, when they are changed again for the following week.
Another way to fight the social media urge is to have an action plan for when you do get bored. Keep a note on your phone with a list of activities you could be doing now, or start up that creative journal.
Even better, if you are home with family, have a real conversation with your spouse or your kids and use the time to connect with them and strengthen those relationships. Your mental health will be much better for it and often those conversations lead to next actions like playing a game together or working on a project.
Bottom line is in order to find more time we need to figure out what we are doing with it right now, what is eating it, and which habits we have to change in order to fix it. Do that, and you will be on the path to not only a better work life balance, but a path that is much more likely to bring you success, both at work and at home.
