Recently I’ve found myself observing a few situations where people were wasting other people’s time and even found myself in a situation where someone was wasting my time and needless to say, I wasn’t happy about it. I started to think of the enormous amount of time that was being lost, not to mention the money for the business owners who were paying staff when nothing was getting done. When you start to look at how it’s impacting the bottom line, the impact gets real very quickly.
What I’ve discovered is that people truly aren’t conscious of the fact that they’re wasting your time. They really don’t have a clue. Since we’re not taught to manage our time, most people aren’t aware of it at all. We learn a lot of things when we’re young–how to read and write, how to ride a bike, and all the knowledge that education brings, but we’re not taught to manage ourselves when it comes to our time. Unless we’re conscious or have a natural sense of it, we can end up lost, which has us waste our time and that of others.
Take a minute to think about it. Do your poor time management habits negatively impact others? What happens when you’re late with that report or when your piece of a project isn’t completed on time? Are you causing others to deliver late or maybe even the entire project to be delivered late? Really take an honest look at your habits around managing your time and how those habits are impacting your co-workers, employees, family and friends. If you’re a business owner, look at how your habits might be impacting your bottom line. Are you wasting someone’s time? If so, it might be time to make the choice to develop better time management skills and increase your productivity as well as the time, energy and effort of others in the process.
©2010 Sheila Hawkins