There’s a saying that goes “Take care of the dimes and the dollars take care of themselves”. No need to explain, it’s a no-brainer. But what I was thinking the other day is that we tend to pay little attention to our dimes of time. Email here, Facebook there, just a little peek over to Twitter, and hey, I could check out if there’s someone new I know on LinkedIn. Have a smoke. Repeat. Do this often enough in a single day and it’s two hours or more gone. And I mean gone. Dead time.
But we’re pretty good at finding excuses afterwards to justify what we did, right? So, if they’re only half as reasonable as we pretend (already getting nervous here?), make a list, a plan for tomorrow, on which you write down everything you do including all these “filler” activities (you can have multiple instances of the same item, because you’re at least checking your inbox twice a day) and for each item on this list, write a good reason for executing this activity with the given amount of time.
Like this: “9.00 a.m.: Check private email, supposed to take 1 minute, will be 10, because I’ll spontaneously decide that more than one particular email will be so subjectively important that I can’t reply later.” If you don’t feel any pain when you’re writing this and going through it afterwards, really nothing it all, I recommend you hand it to your boss, she can certainly help.
The challenge is to replace these bridging activities with ones that create value. You were clever enough to discover your old ones, I’m pretty certain you’ll find some new and useful ones too.