How To Tell If You’re Wasting Your Time

As a professional life coach I have many clients and most of them have a nasty habit in common and that is wasting time. So it begs the question, how to tell if you’re wasting your time? Fortunately there is a way you can overcome this issue and I’m going to share with you today, an exercise which will show you if you’re wasting your time during your daily routine.

So why do you so often forget or neglect to spend time organising your daily schedule? The most common excuse I hear people give for not doing those things they need to do to achieve important goals is that they couldn’t find the time for it. So for example have you been to the gym today? Isn’t one of your goals to lose weight, or maybe increase your energy levels, maybe improve your health, and to achieve these types of goals you promised yourself that you’d go into the gym daily.

Alas you’re constantly busy, not got the time for it, before you knew it the evening had arrived and you’re far too tired to go and exercise now. You just don’t seem able to find the time for it.

Let me straight away offer you a solution. Organising your daily schedule is something that you need to do and life becomes far simpler if you have a plan, doing this will give you the best chance to be happier, more productive, and more successful.

Here is my most important message to you today: If you’re going to be productive, the first thing you have to do is create structure in your life and the only way to do this successfully is by organising your daily schedule.

One of the most common excuses we come up with for our failing to achieve what we want is a lack of time. Many of you will have read so many articles and books trying to find the answer how to make the best use of your time. I’m sure you’ve found very practical solutions but I wonder how successful they’ve been for you. The truth is simple we each get 24 hours in every day, and once time is gone it stays gone – “don’t use it, lose it.”

One of the things I find that many of my coaching clients struggle with the most is being able to structure their day so that they can continually get everything done they need to in order to move forward with their life and goals. There are so many things for you to get done in any given day, that you are often overwhelmed, feelings disappointed with yourself frustrated and low in energy particularly when you fail to achieve what you thought you could today.

As a coach I have found the major problem is generally how much time people waste, worse still they often don’t even realise it.

I am working with somebody at the moment who is a perfect example of this. I got them to do a spotlight on their week. This entails them using a sheet that records everything they do for 24 hours a day and to do this for seven days. Literally everything they do needed to be recorded. Every time they go to boil the kettle, take a visit to the toilet, when they sit at the computer, talk on the phone, read emails, look at sports pages, time spent in Facebook everything they do needs to be recorded down. They have to write exactly what they do and how long they do it for. One thing that showed up clearly for my client was how much time he was throwing away on useless activities.

You could easily try this for yourself. Just carry a small pad and pen around. Record everything you do, with start time and end time, and do this for a week. Look through it and mark activities as productive or non-productive. Try and ask yourself whether, that activity was best use of your time or wasted.

What needs to be clear to you is having structure to your day, can make a huge difference in how you feel and how much you accomplish. Your starting point is to cut out all your time wasters.

I would love to know what your biggest time waster is! Let me know in the comments section below.

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