Time Wasters and How to Avoid Them

I might be one of the only writers I know who does not waste time playing computer games like solitaire. However, I have a boatload of other time wasters! Here are some of them:

• Shopping in the morning to avoid the crowds and traffic
• Checking email during my writing time
• Working on writing that isn’t part of my focus
• Running errands every day instead of grouping them together once or twice a week
• Too much TV and movie watching
• Staring at my to do list, moving stacks of papers and books on my desk, and in a variety of other ways trying to get more organized without actually accomplishing that or anything else!
• Planning for the future too far in advance
• Driving to a store to buy something I might not even need because I have a coupon that’s going to expire today

The question for me soon became – how do I know when I should feel guilty for doing one of these things instead of writing? None of them are bad, per se. But when I can find a way to narrow down what needs to be done and when, that will help me know when to push myself and when to back off without wallowing in unnecessary guilt.

Three changes have helped immensely – 1) creating routines, 2) figuring out what my time wasters are (and where possible, finding ways to avoid them), and 3) figuring out what I really want to write and making sure I stay within those bounds.

So 1) my new routine is to write from 9am to noon, five days a week. 2) I can’t do anything else during that time, especially any of my time wasters. As you can see, I actually made a list of them so I can be forewarned and forearmed before I lose too much time. 3) I made a list of about a half dozen topics I want to stay focused on, whether for fiction or nonfiction.

When a writing opportunity came up last week, I compared the topic to my interest list. It wasn’t on there, and couldn’t easily be angled in one of those ways. I immediately declined the opportunity. Boom! Done! No wasted time trying to figure out how I could make it work. And no guilt! When I got a coupon for my favorite store, I figured out how much the savings would be. I’d created a strategy to avoid wasting time by not making a special trip if the savings was less than $10. Boom! Done! I didn’t leave my writing early that day.

Which brings me back to the connection between guilt and wasting time. The above lists and strategies have helped me to recognize when I am wasting time out of laziness, when I need to stop and take a breath and ask myself what’s wrong, and when I just need to relax and realize life interrupts our schedules sometimes. For me, I only need to allow guilt to exist in the first scenario because that’s what guilt is for – to get us to change what we’re doing. In the last two scenarios, there is nothing to feel guilty about. And with set routines, you can hit “restart” immediately!

What about you? What are your time wasters, and how do you – or can you – avoid them?