If there’s something that runs away in the blink of an eye, it’s Time. We often complain that we have no time but if we’d just pause and look at what we have been doing, we have probably wasted away ours when we had enough.
“Every day you waste is another day you won’t get back” ~ Anonymous
Here are 5 ways to stop wasting the precious hours of our life.
Get off social media.
Social media has become the biggest killer of time. Whoever named it the World Wide Web, knew what a web it was going to turn out to be. Like a fly caught in the web of a spider, we go round and round, unable to break free of the tangle. With smartphones notifying us of everything that’s happening around us, we don’t even need to be logged into our PC.
So, we are either going green eyed at that cousin who’s having a destination wedding and posting hourly updates, or getting into unwanted arguments posting our point of view on topics that are irrelevant and a total waste of time, or busy updating the world about what we ate and if we burped and whether our dog barked. To add to it we are in umpteen groups on our phone and the poor thing keeps beeping the whole day delivering you useless forwards that you forward it again till it comes back to you!
How to stop wasting time on social media? The best thing to do would be to uninstall every dam**d app from the face of your smartphone. Impossible, right? I know! The next best thing would be to turn off notifications when you are completing your work or studies. Avoid looking at the phone every now and then to know who did what. Deactivate once in a while. It is a good detoxifying therapy. The world will not come crashing down if you don’t immediately like someone’s status or post pictures of the food that you are eating.
Get off the endlessly long phone calls.
If social media is bad enough, the long duration phone calls are even worse. They sap your energy and time. But when it’s your best friend or close relative or the love of your life, you cannot just tell them off. Your parents or sibling might understand if you tell them not to call during working or studying hours, but friends often do not.
How to stop wasting time on calls? If you are studying for an important exam or are neck deep in work, the best thing would be to switch off your phone. If that’s not possible, let the calls go your answering machine. Put in a message that you are studying now or are working and will respond to their calls after a particular time, say after 7 pm.
Stop procrastinating.
Putting off things that you can do today to another day is such a waste of time. Sure, it might not be urgent and it can be put off, but if there’s time today, the best thing to do is finish it off. Completed work equals that much less stress.
Don’t do unnecessary things.
Don’t go and clean your garden when there are more important things to be done. Don’t sit and gossip when you need to devote time to something else. Don’t watch back to back movies on Netflix when your attention is needed elsewhere. There’s a time for everything. Relaxing is important too, but relax in between work, not vice versa.
Make a to-do list.
A to-do list is an effective way to get things done. I stick three different colored papers on my board, green for work that needs to be done urgently in a day or two, yellow for work that can be stretched to a week and pink for work that does not need immediate attention yet needs to be done within a time frame. I keep ticking off the ones in green as I finish and move to the yellow and then to the pink.
The Eisenhower matrix is yet another way that I use to prioritise my work. It let's me slot my activities into four categories -urgent and important, urgent and not important, not urgent but important, and lastly, neither urgent nor important. Once work is slotted in one these four categories, it gives you an idea about which work needs your attention immediately, which work can be delegated, which ones can be put off for later and which ones you can skip doing completely.
What's your mantra?
