Let’s talk about time thieves.

In The Currency Of Time I wrote about how important the currency of time is. 

In Defying the Aging Timeline I reiterated the importance of prioritising our time throughout the different stages of our lives.

Time has always been important to me and is one of the reasons I became a Lean practitioner. There is nothing worse than wasted time in the workplace as that’s where we spend much of our lives.

Recently I’ve been thinking about where my time goes and how I can proactively utilise my time better. It occurred to me that there are three time thieves stealing precious time from me.

 

Maybe these 3 time thieves are stealing your time from you also?

1. Phone

I have an on/off relationship with my phone.

I’m not a phone person meaning I don’t like being on my phone. I don’t like talking on the phone, I dislike getting notifications on my phone and I don’t like spending too much time on my phone in general, I find it all very overwhelming.

In saying that I do like what my phone allows me to do. I like that everything is accessible on my phone – my photos, my writing, emails, banking, podcasts, audiobooks, the knowledge of the internet – everything is available instantly.

The problem is all of the above means I spend way more time on my phone than I would like.

 

2. Email

Email has widely been labeled as a communication tool, I think email is actually really poor at communication. It’s great for information sharing but in terms of communication, I think it creates more communication problems than it solves.

Think about how effective email is compared to a phone call or a conversation in person – there’s absolutely no comparison. What could take 50 emails back and forth would be better communicated in a 10 minute phone call or a 2 minute face to face conversation.

For me email is more of a miscommunication tool!

For the 25 years I spent in the corporate world I really disliked email and found it overwhelming and most of the time, a massive waste of time. So many emails could have been avoided by quick phone calls or face to face conversations.

Even though I don’t work in the corporate world anymore I still find too much of my time goes on emails.

 

3. Social media

I also have an on/off relationship with social media.

Sometimes I like it and sometimes I dislike it.

I use social media to share my writing and I also use it for scrolling and can end up going down the social media rabbit hole which costs me way more time than I’d like.

Social media is addictive.

It’s addictive because it’s built to be addictive. There are literally teams of very skilled people behind every app we use pushing what they want us to view in terms of posts, videos, ads etc.

Recently I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix and it was frightening. The social media apps we use literally make money from our attention. Of course we don’t think of our scrolling as making money for someone else but it does!

 

Do you find your phone, email and social media are time thieves?

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Thanks for reading,

Siobhain

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