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. Who doesn’t want to sit down and watch a game now and then. One way that this has played out for me over the years is watching sports. Sometimes however, unwinding can turn into something beyond healthy. Time sinks at home are a bit trickier because we absolutely need to stop and unwind and how we do that varies. 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. I’m not saying we can never take a break, but some “breaks” are more helpful than others. More choices can lead to overwhelm, and ultimately inaction. 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. Our tendency however is to come home from work and want to zone out. 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. 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. 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. 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. Secondary to deciding if a meeting is necessary would be making sure it has clear direction. Everyone gets more done when they aren’t in a meeting. 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. 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. Second to email is probably conference calls and meetings. All kidding aside, keep a limit on email and watch your productivity go up.įor more on organizing emails check out Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Work Week“ or David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. 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. Remember, nobody ever died because they didn’t get an immediate email response from you. 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. 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. To avoid these traps, set aside a time and a set time limit on email and then move on. Having email open all the time is a massive distraction.Īs 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.Įven 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. 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). Work inefficiencies, pleasure binging, and boredom. For me, time sinks usually fall into to a few major categories. 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. 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. There never seems to ever be enough time to accomplish everything we need to get done. This post contains affiliate links, for more info see our disclaimer.
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