5 Common Timesinks That Are Destroying your Productivity (And How to Avoid Them!)
Stop me when this scenario starts sounding familiar: you’ve finished a long day of work, with many hours of work behind you — and there are still a bunch of tasks left unfinished on your to-do list.
Time is a valuable resource for everybody. Fortunately, we don’t live in a world like the film In Time where people need to buy time to live. In this world, everyone has a limited amount of time. So, what’s one thing you always need to avoid? Timesinks.
By definition, a timesink is anything that ruins your productivity, in turn lowering your motivation and causing stress. It’s not unlike a CPU cooler heatsink: instead of dissipating heat, it dissipates time. Here are five of the most common and destructive culprits:
1. Always Saying Yes
“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage pleasantly, smilingly, and non-apologetically — to say no to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger yes burning inside.”
— Stephen Covey
Most people out there do their level best to never say No to anything at all. While on the surface this seems like a positive and supportive rule, in reality it just drags them down. In turn, prioritizing what matters and saying No to distractions can earn you more respect from others as well as yourself.
The truth is, your ability to say No is often a reflection of your level of self-assurance. If you have low self-assurance, you won’t prioritize yourself and you’ll feel constrained to annoy or irritate other people. If you have high self-assurance, you’ll instead go after what matters most to you with dedication.
In October 2020, this Instagram post from The Midnight Library and Reasons to Stay Alive author Matt Haig made a solid point:
After a long list of powerful “No” statements, he ended the post with this line:
No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.
Hard to disagree with that, isn’t it?
2. Not Automating Repetitive Tasks
“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”
— Henry David Thoreau
Automating repetitive tasks that barely require any creativity and brainpower from your side is a crucial step to saving time. With the rise of tools like IFTTT, this is more easier to do now than ever before.
To do this, try to make a list of things that you do everyday that can be automated or delegated. Once you finalize that list, you can go ahead and put each task into action. You won’t believe how much time you are able to free up with just this little change!
3. Not Capitalising on the Knowledge of Others
“You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.”
— Sam Levenson
Most people learn from their mistakes. That is how life works: you make a mistake, you pick yourself up, and — armed with better wisdom than before— you try again. However, as the above quote from Sam Levenson indicates, that process can be shortened in the first place by learning from others instead.
Why limit yourself and learn just from your own personal mistakes when you can get valuable lessons from the mistakes of other people too? Of course, the most direct way to do this is through books, interviews, and podcasts. Whenever you face a problem, consider if someone else has faced that problem before too, and try to apply the lessons that they learned. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Another thing to consider is that sometimes a lesson learned in one area can also be applied to a seemingly unrelated area too. For example, a lesson learned from a sport can also be applied to investing or relationships.
This way, you can avoid going into that trouble and save a bunch of time. Obviously there are some lessons that can only be learned firsthand, but with a more generalised approach you can save a lot of time and get far ahead of most people.
4. Multitasking
“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”
—Russian proverb
I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth mentioning twice. Let me quote from the book The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan: “When you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well. If you think multitasking is an effective way to get more done, you’ve got it backward. It’s an effective way to get less done.”
They also say, “When you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well. If you think multitasking is an effective way to get more done, you’ve got it backward. It’s an effective way to get less done.”
As the book has taught me, it’s much better to be laser-focused on one task at a time and being dedicated to it all the way to completion rather than lose your energy managing multiple things on your plate.
5. The Information Superhighway
“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
— Derek Sivers
Everybody knows that we live in an age of information overload. There’s so much stuff coming at us from all directions, knowing how to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not is an essential lifeskill. By having FOMO and always being up to date, it’s easy to bog down your brain and kill your creativity.
What’s the solution to this? First, you can set limits to how much time you spend online daily and only look for content that adds some kind of value to your passion. Being a little bit mindful goes a long way.
How Would You Spend $86,400 Today?
“You get 86,400 seconds a day. Imagine if you wake up everyday with $86,400 in your bank account, and everyday at the end of the night it’s gone. Whether you wasted it or not and then the next day you get another $86,400.
You would do everything in your power to spend it, because the next day you know you’re getting another $86,400. You don’t want to leave nothing there. You’d make the best of it, right? You get 86,400 seconds.
Why waste time? It doesn’t carry over to the next day. It doesn’t earn interest. You know? Take everyday and every moment and make something of it. Make something positive.”
