Time is at a premium, now more than ever. Companies are asking their workers to do more with less, and that includes time. We never seem to have enough time to do everything. Part of the problem is that we are falling victim to time sinks, where we are not using our time as efficiently as possible, Here are some time sinks to avoid.

1. Unrealistic expectations

If you are looking at a house and find that it costs $300,000, you would look elsewhere if that is out of your price range. If a real estate agent told you the house would still be on the market a year later, you would probably tell him or her that you still would not be able to afford it.

When it comes to money, we have more or less realistic expectations of what our future assets and earnings will look like. But when it comes to time, we don’t.

For example, if someone asked you to go on a trip to the beach with them for a week, and he or she planned on leaving the next day, you would probably tell them you just don’t have the time. But, if the person asked you the same questions, only the vacation was six months away, you might be more inclined to say yes.

That is because we always seem to believe we will have more time available in the future than we do now, even though there may be no logical reason to believe this.

Since we are not very good at projecting our time constraints into the future, we need to use whatever tools are at our disposal to help us to be more accurate, and with time, one of these is a calendar. Fill in your calendar for the next several weeks or even months with all of your planned tasks or events – meetings, projects, gym time.

We also tend to underestimate how long a task will take, so give yourself more time than you think it will take.

2. Interruptions

How long can you work without being interrupted? Someone coming over to chat? Receiving a text, email or Slack message?
Our workday is being cut into increasingly smaller bits of time by all of the interruptions. One survey found that for the average worker, there are almost 90 of these time bites, each lasting five to ten minutes. The solution to the problem is to turn off the technology. Close the email and turn off the cell phone.

3. The urgent squeezing out the important

Some days, we seem to get a lot of things done, but at the end of the day, we don’t really feel like we accomplished anything. That is because we have fallen prey to doing the urgent over doing the important. We focus on those tasks that have looming deadlines, even though these things may be rather trivial, while neglecting the more important tasks or projects due further down the line.

The solution to this time sink is to prioritize our tasks, so that the important things we need to get done are at the top of the list. Another way to handle the problem is to schedule a certain amount of time for a particular task, giving the more important tasks more time on the schedule.

At Winston Resources, we care about our job candidates, our results and our relationships. We take the time to get to know each one of our candidates, enabling us to make better matches with employers. We treat our people with respect, and establish long-term relationships. Give us a call today to see what we can do for you.