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Productivity

These 5 Time Killers Are Your Biggest Enemies

Research Team Leader, T&I Consultancy

Your internet research will not give you much information on time killers. In the first place, let’s settle the definition of time killers. Time killers are the things that waste your time, energy and creativity. But usually it isn’t an arcade game or Japanese comics. Many say that what kills their time are tasks at home, school or job, but they’re not time killers. Time killers are the activities and things that are meaningless and have no values. Each person has his or her own time killers. But we all have a few things in common. So I’m presenting to you the 5 most common time killers that are widespread among people.

Internet 

I may sound like a commonplace, but it is one of the most prevailing time killers around. The internet can be an addiction since it is the kind of medium that possesses us although we are not aware of it. Sure, it helps us communicate easily, reach information we need and order things that we can’t obtain in a regular market. But we exaggerate all its advantages and by this we became addicted to internet so that we become unaware of the world around us. Once we sign up for social networking, we can’t sign out and return to real world. While surfing the internet or watching videos online we become ignorant of the time that we have already spent online. That is how we find ourselves spending an hour online when we meant to just spend 15 minutes.

Cell phones

Recent cell phones have many features; phoning, texting, internet usage, social networking, emailing, taking photos, listening to music, watching videos, playing games. That is why they are called smartphones. However, people don’t know that sometimes those features are over-helping us. We talk on the phone for hours or text every 5-10 minutes and don’t take into account the time we spend. We don’t want to accept the fact that it is not right to talk to a person a lot on the phone or text a lot when we can meet him or her and talk face to face.

TV and media

Watching TV may be entertaining and there is nothing bad about that. The same can be said about media, since it can be very informative. However, many studies have shown that TV has the ability to makes us dumber and media can easily manipulate our mind by filling our mind with subjective and wrong information. Information about those studies can be found in Psychology Today and other psychology journals. Television companies try their best to produce shows that will attract us. However, we don’t understand that the more time we spend watching TV, the more profit television companies make. The same is true for media. While we are watching TV we forget about the things we should do or take care of, it makes us lazy and ignorant. Sure, I don’t want to say that you shouldn’t watch TV or look at media, but track the time while you are doing it, because both of them are common time killers.

Negative thoughts

I always advise people to think for themselves, whether they’re right or wrong. It is important to come up with your own ideas. However, people spend a lot of time on negative and frustrating thoughts, mostly on their past negative experiences and failures. It may sound meaningless, but while you are doing a task it is important to focus on it, not on negative thoughts. Think about all the time that you spend thinking about bad things before you start to do something new. Fixating on negative thoughts may stress or depress you.

People

Time killers are not only activities or things. People can also be time killers. Communicating with people is a great activity since it involves relief, communication, and exchange of information. However, we have a lot of people in our lives who are negative or annoying. There are people that we do not like for some reason and who we’d like to avoid talking to, but whom we talk and communicate with because of the courtesy. Those people are killing our time, energy, and mood. This is about people that we meet in our daily life, not in workplace, since in our daily life only we chose people that are involved.

These are some common time killers that you can consider to maybe help with your time management. However, you can also find and point out time killers that are involved in your life.

Featured photo credit: picjumbo via picjumbo.com