What’s Eating Your Time?
Being a busy working career mom can be a real challenge when it comes to managing and protecting our time. God has blessed us with a new day, another 24 hours, we try to be good stewards over it .
But I am finding out that even the most productive person needs to take an awareness day occasionally, do a time assessment, to see whether unseen distractions are eating away their time or not. It happens to almost everyone and can creep up on you if you’re not being mindful.
Here is a list of Time Zappers that you may need to be aware of:
• Avoiding Real Planning – If you don’t plan, you will not succeed in a way that makes it repeatable. That’s the key to success. You may accidentally find yourself in a place of victory, but without planning, you may not stay there.
• Interruptions and Notifications – Every time you get interrupted when you’re engaged, it causes a time delay. Many experts say that it can cost you 30 minutes for even a three-minute interruption. Most interruptions are due to phone calls, notifications, and interruptions by people.
• Clutter – Whether it’s mind clutter or physical clutter having to work through it all on a daily basis will waste more of your time. For example, if your clothes are on closest floor, instead of hanging up neatly, you’re losing time. If you’re frequently distracted by inner thoughts, worries, and feelings this clutter is almost guaranteed to cause you issues and make it difficult to make choices.
• Unplanned Meals – One of the biggest time-wastes is neglecting to plan meals ahead of time and create a corresponding shopping list. Going shopping without a detailed list, leads to a great deal of wasted time wandering up and down the aisles trying to think on your feet. This puts you under pressure to hurry and get home, which turns into more stress and cluttered thoughts.
• Unplanned Socializing – Everyone likes to socialize. Even if you’re an introvert, you probably socialize online by surfing social media, engaging in conversations online, and so forth. Maybe you are socializing in the break room at work, or you’re allowing friendly phone calls during tasks to turn into socializing when you’re supposed to be doing something else.
• Lack of Boundaries – If you can’t say no, you are probably taking up the slack for several people in your life. From relatives to coworkers, to clients you may be allowing creep in to eat up your time. When in doubt, learn to say no first. You can always change your mind and say yes at a later time when you’ve thought about it more thoroughly.
• Multitasking – Studies show that no human can multitask effectively. Even though you can walk and chew gum, or drive a car while listening to music, the truth is your mind really switches back and forth between tasks and doesn’t do them simultaneously. Some studies are showing multitasking being responsible for a 30 to 40 percent decline in productivity. Test it out.
• Exhaustion – If you’re not getting enough sleep, it can be challenging to realize how much time you may be wasting trying not to fall asleep. You need a bright mind to be productive. Add breaks into your day, and learn to sleep well each night.
If you really want to be more productive with your time, you have engaged in mindful planning so that you can embark on each day with a plan knowing exactly what you need to do and what the impact of those actions are.
Taking the time to plan tomorrow the night before, while also engaging in both long-term and short-term planning, you’ll see a massive difference in your productivity, but it won’t happen accidentally, it will only occur through mindful planning.
Psalm 90:12 - So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
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