How to Get Rid of These 5 Time Wasters: Agents/Brokers — Reclaim Your Time 🚀
We’re all granted 24 hours, but weirdly for some, it never feels like enough time. When you wake up, you may feel optimistic. Fueled by coffee, you’re ready to face the day, but before you know it, it’s 2 pm and half of the day is missing. Where did it go? What did you do? Why do you feel intellectually drained with nothing to show for?
It’s not that you have done nothing. After all, you’ve watched the latest videos from your favorite million dollars listing cast members, scrolled through your Facebook newsfeed, replied to messages, deleted spam from your inbox, and spent some time around the office catching up with your colleagues.
But, by the end of the day, you still haven’t made a dent at work. When you’re the boss, it’s more difficult to justify your lack of productivity. The bottom line is that you must get it together. You have to identify what’s killing indeed your productivity and then avoid doing those things so that you can recover your time. Let’s discuss the most common time wasters and how to avoid them.
Time Waster #1: Checking and Updating Social Media
We’re in a social era. We have the ability to see, contact, and share with others in milliseconds, no matter the location. Distance doesn’t exist. We’re among the first generations in history to have an instant connection. It’s a great time to be alive. Yet, on the flip side, social media is a huge time suck.
If you’re honest, you may spend hours/week on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. Catching up on your friends’ latest posts, uploading/captioning your photos, and replying to comments takes away valuable time. Multiply it now by the number of times you refresh the page or app, and you can see why this is one of the biggest time wasters.
If productivity is an issue for you, consider severely limiting your social media activity to once a day during the week.
For those who must use social media for work, consider automating any social updates. Devote a few hours each week to filling a social media calendar with your updates. Then, using a service like Buffer or Hootsuite to automatically schedule posts to your different pages.
Time Waster #2: Checking Your Email
Checking email sounds productive. After all, you’re catching up on relevant information, such as news, office memos, urgent meetings, and more. You need to check emails. While you can’t escape emails, you also shouldn’t keep your inbox open constantly.
Every time you get a new email, it will distract you away from what you’re doing. Instead, consider setting two times each day for checking your inbox. No matter how urgent the email, it can always wait a few hours (and to not worry Frontdoor is matching automatically all new leads for you :).
Time Waster #3: Not Scheduling Your Time Carefully
You need a schedule for your day. Lack of productivity can often be tied to not having a daily schedule. If you’re the type to wing it, you’d be mismanaging your day. Instead of letting the day take you whenever it will implement a simple schedule, focused on your top three priorities.
Studies show that we’re only productive for about 3hrs out of the day. Ouch.
Armed with this insight, make your schedule work for you– specifically when you’re more productive. To do this, study yourself for a period to determine when you’re most productive and for how long. So-called morning larks are extremely productive, often before the sun rises. Night owls get their best work done at night 😃.
Of course, if you don’t have the luxury of working whenever you’d like, and are stuck to a 9 to 5, consider shifting your most important tasks to a block of time when you’re most alert and ready to tackle challenges.
Time Waster #4: Over-Planning
Scheduling is beneficial because it helps us prioritize. However, there’s a danger in over-planning. If you’re not careful, you may think that you can squeeze even more “stuff” into your to-do list.
Time Waster #5: Not Sleeping Long Enough
Have you ever heard the phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”? How can you not admire someone who seems so productive? Such people must be able to do a lot with their lives because they’re actually harnessing more hours out of the day.
Not so fast. Studies show that sleep deprivation (not getting enough sleep on a consistent basis) leads to reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision making, and poor memory. Instead of trying to get more work done in the day, consider getting more sleep so when you are awake, your time is better spent.
So… What’s your time waster? 😀
