Five Ways To Waste Your Business Day
Imagine if you could save four hours a week which you could devote to your job. An extra 10% effort and achievement will have a huge impact on your efficiency and your worth to an employer. Below are five common ways you can waste valuable time during your business day.
If you work for someone else, you are doing yourself and your employer a disservice. It might help your motivation if you consider that it is stealing from your employer if you engage in these activities during work time – that is exactly what it is!
If you work for yourself it is complete madness to spend time on these activities.
1. Long phone conversations
Almost all business calls can be concluded within two minutes. Just four fifteen minute phone calls take a precious hour out of your work day.
2. Joke emails
These are a complete time-waster and often a virus threat. I used to get loads of these from friends who clearly had nothing better to do. You can easily waste 15 minutes a day just clearing these emails let alone reading them, replying and forwarding them so you can waste other people’s work time.
3. Surfing the internet
The amount of time you can waste on the internet is boundless. Apart from news, sport, gossip and shopping we now have social media sites. Then add music downloads, chat rooms and worst of all pornography, and you have a massive time-waster at your fingertips. Of course there are positive reasons to surf these sites (with the exception of porn) but not during work hours. Even outside work hours, you should be careful with your time and energy on these.
4. Internet Auctions
Checking and making bids on auction sites such as EBay can be a huge time- taker. This is especially the case if you are bidding on a “hot” item which you want to monitor for the last 15 minutes of an auction. Essentially your work productivity during those 15 minutes is zero. I have two suggestions; first don’t bid during work hours, second if an auction closes during work hours, put in an auto-bid up to the price you are happy to pay and forget it. Incidentally this is the best auction technique in any case. If the auction goes higher than your price you are better not to participate!
5. Meetings
One of the joys of being self-employed is not having meetings. These are without a doubt the least productive, most energy-sapping time wasters of the modern corporate world. If you organize long meetings – stop! If you are required to attend – complain! In my experience emails and phone calls can resolve most decision making. If required, a meeting of the key three or four people for 15 minutes should be enough to resolve any issues. There might be two or three exceptions a year such as an AGM, but make them exceptions rather than the rule. Let me put it another way. Calculate the cost of a meeting of 20 people for three hours. That’s 60 hours of people-time, plus preparation time plus loss of productivity after the meeting because everyone is de- energized and half have headaches. Let’s say 80 people-hours at an average of $30 per hour. That’s a cost of $2,400 which is equivalent to two extra employees that week – just from one meeting!
Here’s a simple equation where T= time and W=wasting.
T = $
W x T = W$