It’s November. November!
Life is busy and full now, but I know after Thanksgiving, life will hit full on crazy because our family schedule will be so busy.
Is Your Busy Day As Busy As You Think?
Every night, I crash into bed and think of how busy my day was. How I didn’t get done all of the many things I wanted to do.
For instance, one of my goals this year is to make 12 homemade Christmas presents for my family. I set this goal in January and figured I’d make one present a month. Manageable, right? Now that it’s November, I should theoretically have 10 Christmas presents completed.
Guess how many I do have completed?
One.
Yep, just one.
But even though I have this supposed time shortage, I have time to check Facebook several times a day for five to twenty minutes at a shot.
Making Christmas presents with supplies I have on hand will save me a lot of money come December. But I’m not making the presents. I’m too busy checking Facebook.
My day is busy, sure, but I’m making it busier by wasting my precious time throughout the day.
Can you relate? Likely you can, as “CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the average US consumer spends 40 minutes on Facebook per day” (Business Insider).
Common Time Sucks
The problem with our hyper-connected society is that there are so many ways to waste time. There is Facebook, as we’ve already mentioned, and all the many other social media platforms—Twitter, Periscope, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Don’t forget blogs and online games as distractions.
With smartphones, you don’t have to limit wasting your time to home; you can waste your time on the go, too.
But it’s not just electronics that waste our time.
How cluttered is your house? How much time do you waste just looking for things?
Our house is much more cluttered than I would like, so I waste a lot of time looking for things. Today my husband and daughter spent 10 minutes looking for her school folder. Last weekend I spent 20 minutes looking for the cord to our external hard drive. I still have not found it, and because I can’t access what I need on there, I had to waste time recreating what is already on the hard drive. That sucked another 60 minutes of my time.
Simple Schedule Changes Can Help You Save Or Make Money
Now that I’m aware of how much time I’m really wasting, I’ve decided to make changes. I’ve set a schedule to check Facebook once in the morning and once at night. I cannot spend more than 10 minutes total. I’m also on a mission to declutter the house once and for all (and maybe even make a little money).
By not checking Facebook throughout the day, but only twice a day, I will easily have another 20 to 30 minutes in my day. There are roughly seven weeks until Christmas. Seven weeks times 30 minutes a day is 1,470 minutes or 24.5 hours!! I could very easily complete all of my homemade Christmas presents in that time and save myself a bundle of money.
There is nothing wrong with relaxing in the evening, after you’re already tired and unproductive, to read your favorite blog or look through Facebook. But when those things take up our time during our most productive hours, we must admit that we’re not as busy as we think. If we make smarter choices with the use of our time, we’ll have more opportunities to both make and save money.
Have you taken the time to observe how much time you waste during the day? Are you as shocked as I am about the amount of wasted time in your day? If you changed your habits and created more time by limiting distractions, how could you save or make more money?
Hmmm. installed rescuetime months ago and tracked my PC activity. I was shocked to see how much time I wasted on various useless tasks, instead of doing highly productive work. Then I started using the Pomodoro technique, worked on my most important tasks and focused better. I was able to do in 2 hours more than I used in 8 hours of ‘working’