Justin Lloyd

Welcome to the Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, a weekly series of tip-offs that aim to boost your productivity, give you back your precious time and show you how to over-come procrastination and all of it done in sweet and tasty, bite-size chunks.

Time wasting is killing your productivity , who would have thought it! Watch closely, see? Right there? You just lost another valuable, irreplaceable minute in the small crevices of your life. If there were some magical way to completely replay your past 30 days, you would be astounded by the amount of time you waste doing nothing at all. You would be rendered speechless at the mental distractions you foist on yourself. And if you could compare your last 30 days to someone who is not wasting time you would be stunned by how much more productive they are. Unfortunately, there is not, but there are ways you can identify lost moments and retrieve them from down the back of life’s couch where all small things gather, waiting, for that day when they will be rediscovered by an inquisitive set of fingers.

Much of my working life is spent in front of a computer; I write documents, read contracts, respond to email and a variety of other tasks. The computer is the hub of my daily activity and most knowledge workers spend their days just like this too, sat in front of a computer of some description, re-arranging pixels on a glowing display in an effort to make them interesting enough so that other people will pay for them.

When you spend that much time using a computer, it is very easy to become sidetracked. Through various scientific studies carried out by other people, including informal reviews around the office at my video game development company, coupled with decades of my own personal experience as an entrepreneur, I can emphatically state that it takes upwards of 15 minutes to become clearly focused on a non-rote, highly cognitive task requiring concentration and creativity. The slightest interruption, distraction or stray thought can render hours of your life utterly spent.

There are huge gains to be made by making simple changes in small areas of your life. Just as it is with software applications such as your word processor, 90% of the time is spent executing only 10% of the program code, the same is true with your life. A good 90% of your day or week is spent doing the same wasteful, low-value activities that disrupt your mental flow and distract you from what is important to you. Optimise that 10% and you will gain back untold hours over the course of a week, month or year. And just like with software, the parts of the application that are never executed by the computer are the most optimal of all.

For the next several weeks, I will be writing one tip-off every Tuesday and answering questions on how to overcome the mental roadblocks we throw out there that prevent us from leading the best life we can. In the next post is the first of what I aim to be many posts in an on-going series that will help you to optimize your life by streamlining, speeding up or completely eliminating worthless, low-value activities that cause the grand picture of your life to get lost in the details.

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