This is the final article in this series about “making time count” in the workplace. The four categories of activities that most professionals spend doing on a typical workday: Firefighting; Attention Getters; Capacity Building; and Time Wasters. This week we will highlight the final category of activity: Time Wasters.
Time Wasters are activities that are done each day that do not result in any productivity. If an inordinate amount of time is spent surfing the web, playing computer games, watching television, or visiting every co-worker who will listen to a good story, then time is being wasted. Time management gurus will tell us that nobody really plans to waste time, so time wasters cannot be described as proactive. It would also be inaccurate to say that we are reacting to time wasters. Time wasters do not “sneak up” on us and take us by surprise, thus necessitating a reaction. We make conscious choices about how to spend our time, and most of us get a nagging feeling when we have crossed a line and are wasting too much time.
The best way to describe a time waster is “inactive”. When we feel that our motivation and desire wane, it is possible that we have become a slave to traditional time management principles and not taken any ‘down time’. We have been programmed to stay away from activities that are “Time Wasters”, or those activities that are best classified as inactive.
It is true that playing computer games late into the night or text messaging friends for 5 hours a day is an indication of a problem. Still, everyone needs some down time. Everyone needs inactivity, whereby they are not producing something, or working to accomplish the next big task or mark off the next item on the ‘to do’ list. This time is usually spent doing a number of things that we enjoy; things that make us feed refreshed after doing them.
Traditional time management practice may not encourage “time wasters”, but they do end up making us more productive by periodically recharging our batteries. We will lose our charge if we do not include this valuable down time.
(“Building A Customer Service Culture—The 7 ServiceElements of Customer Service”, by Robert Hobbi & Mario Martinez)
