It’s Costing You Time

Time is a resource like money. You cannot change it. A minute is a minute like a dollar is a dollar. In What is Time and The Time Management Myth you learned about the difference between time and how we experience time. You cannot manage time, but must manage actions instead.

The actions you take determine how you choose to spend the currency of time. Spending time without thought leads to spending time in ways that do not help or serve you. Many actions squander time. Some are like throwing pennies in a wishing well with a song and prayer, hoping your wish will come true. Others are a gift we give to others. And some are wasted, like money slipping through your fingers never to be retrieved.

Here are the major ways you cost yourself time:

1. Worrying – Worrying is thinking about a future outcome that you have no control over. It pretends to be necessary and you believe it is helpful to plan for every eventual outcome. But the truth is you cannot control the future, nor predict what will happen and therefore worrying does not serve you. It only serves to distract you from the present moment.

2. Buffering – Buffering refers to any action that is taken to avoid the actual work. This includes activities like distraction eating, social media, and binge-watching Netflix. These cost significant time when used in place of working towards your goals.

 
3. People pleasing – People pleasing occurs when you are more concerned about someone else’s reaction and how they feel about you than about the goals and priorities in your life. This wastes time because you spend it trying to control another person’s response, which is not possible.

4. Indecision – Indecision is a sneaky expense. It occurs when you endlessly weigh pros and cons or procrastinate. When sitting with indecision, you are choosing to avoid action. It can feel like action because you think about the decision to be made, but when you delay a decision in order to avoid making the wrong decision, you lose the opportunity to take action and to learn.

5. Confusion – Confusion is never a helpful expense. Confusion costs a lot of time currency because you spiral around and around convincing yourself that you do not know the answers and therefore cannot possibly take action. But every problem begins with missing information. Confusion rears up when you aren’t certain what to do next and, much like indecision, robs us of the ability to take action and move forward.

6. Judging – Similar to people pleasing, judging takes your time currency away from forward action. It focuses your attention externally on something outside of your control. It costs your time currency by distracting you and taking you away from solving the actual issue at hand.

7. Overwhelm – Overwhelm happens to us all, but it is an expensive, indulgent feeling. Stemming from thoughts that there is not enough time, overwhelm feels like a natural response. But it costs you time currency by taking your focus away from systematically working through your to-do list.

8. Regretting  – The past is the past. It happened exactly as it did, good or bad, and until a time machine exists, you cannot change it. Spending currency on regret steals it from the present, and the present is the only reality.

Thinking of time as currency allows you to budget time like you budget your paycheck. You get to choose what is of value to spend your time on. Choosing where you spend your time is a soft skill that will pay dividends to help you accomplish your goals. 

In the next post, you will learn about way to make or create time through your choices. The next first step is choosing one of these time wasters and examine in your life how it robs you of your time.