The 9 Things That Are Stealing Your Time

Time is your only finite resource and it’s being stolen from you. Constantly. Time theft can be subtle. It comes in the form of polite and reasonable requests, of email CCs and FYIs, of commitments and obligations. If not caught early, succumbing to time stealing could happen throughout your whole career. You won’t realise until you look back and realise you have nothing significant to show for your labour.

Clearing your calendar of non-essentials is crucial to you doing the things you were put here to do. I don’t mean sending emails and passing time in between meetings. I mean the needle-moving actions that will get you from where you are now to where you want to be.

If you don’t guard your time like it’s your most prized possession, it will be taken from you. You wouldn’t sit by whilst someone stole your watch or your laptop, and this is no different.

Here are the 9 things that are stealing your time:

1.   Other people’s priorities

Your inbox represents other people’s priorities and should not be treated like a to-do list. It’s the same with your phone ringing and your WhatsApp notifications. If you spend all day reacting to cries of attention, you won’t reach a state of flow working on the things that really matter.

Set your own rules. Specify the time you will be available for interruptions or requests and stick to it. This could be communicated on your voicemail, your email autoresponder or simply by closing everything and batching your responses in-between your deep work.

2.   Case-by-case decisions

If you are the bottleneck for every decision in your business, your time will be spent making them over and over again. Go the extra step in the short term to clear space in the long term. Create processes. Build “if this then that” flowcharts. Remove the need for case-by-case. Teach your team to scrutinize through your eyes and self-edit. Every time you answer a new question, add it to an FAQ document, available for all. Every time you are asked an old question, refer to the FAQ document. Soon this process will happen without you being part of it, which equals freedom and opportunity for everyone involved.

3.   Obligations

Every time you buy or commit to something, question what it means for how you’ll spend your time in the future. The decision to buy a dog isn’t just about the monetary cost of the dog, it’s food and the inevitable vet bills. There’s also an investment of time required to train it and walk it, and there’s the cost of your freedom in making plans and travelling. You must also consider the opportunity cost of however else you could spend that time and money. Consider everything before committing so you have no regrets.

Follow this process for all your obligations. If you put yourself forward to organise the socials, what gives? For each meeting you agree to, consider the brainspace you’ll lose before and after it, plus the opportunity cost of that hour.

4.   Tasks that other people could do

Managers take the people they look after along a learning curve until they can confidently and successfully handle responsibilities on their own. In the early stages of the learning curve it’s easy to compare the time it will take to teach someone, with the (much shorter) time in which you could do it yourself.

This short-term thinking overlooks the bigger picture. The goal is to train then trust someone to deliver; not hedge bets and end up with double the workload. Put the energy into upskilling and coaching and be clear with your expectations. Doing other people’s tasks is a false economy and means you can’t focus on those things that only you can do.

5.   Explaining things twice

I once completed the Three Peaks Challenge in a group led by an ex-military guide called Aaron. Before each mountain Aaron delivered a comprehensive briefing complete with a question and answer session. During each hike, if he was asked anything that duplicated information provided during the briefing, he would start the answer with “As you were briefed…” and then proceed to repeat himself. Whilst his response didn’t come across as impolite, it delivered a clear message, “Listen the first time”. Write notes if you need to. I have done my job, now you do yours.

Waiters who don’t write down customer orders inevitably make mistakes. Not listening carefully and not writing down instructions leads to missing details that could have been nailed first time. Train others in this method and follow it yourself. As you were briefed.

6.   Scrolling social media

In a list of everything that costs the economy; sick days, snow days, viruses and spam email; I suspect that consuming media tops all. Social media platforms exist to create slot-machine-like apps that keep people on them for longer, without realising it’s happening. Remember, consumption is killing your success.

Switch the balance in favour of producing over consuming. Write, create, produce, film and publish, instead of scrolling, checking and clicking. Your newsfeed isn’t important. It will wait. Reserve space for catching up but don’t allow it to happen sporadically throughout the day. Social media should not be allowed to steal your time.

7.   Watching TV

Sitting in front of the television mindlessly watching whatever happens to be on is stealing your time. Watch Game of Thrones after you’ve changed the world, not before. Resist the urge to watch what everyone else is watching. It doesn’t matter if you can’t keep up with the conversations, you can talk about something else. It doesn’t matter if you hear spoilers, you’ll forget about them in no time. Spoiler alert: no one ever made a significant difference by watching TV.

If you’re really interested in certain topics, learn about them before Netflix turns them into a questionable documentary. Find your sources of relevant information and schedule them into your week, so you stay in control of what you consume.

8.   Gossiping

Talking about the lives and actions of other people is a massive waste of [JSM3] time. If the focus of your conversation involves mutual friends, celebrities or the random people you’ve interacted with, it’s taking the place of plans, ideas and high-energy conversation topics that add to your life rather than drain you and portray you as a gossip or drama queen.

In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

9.   Doing the nonessential

When writing a to-do list or planning your day, think of everything you’re about to do as “essential” and “nonessential”. Or “big things” and “little things”. The specific labels don’t matter, as long as there’s some way of categorising which are the game changing actions and which are those that aren’t important, don’t need to happen, or could be done by someone else. The goal isn’t to be busy, the goal is to be effective. Clear out the nonessential and make better use of the space now available.

With your master plan created and your vision firmly in mind, fiercely guarding your time will help you stick to it. Don’t reach the end of the year with nothing significant to show. Find out what is stealing your time and stop it happening.