Don't Focus On Lost Time

We’ve all had moments where we realize that we just wasted our time.

It’s working on that project only to realize that one of the first details as wrong, and you need to redo the whole thing. It’s getting caught in a research or social media rabbit hole and when you snap out of it you can’t believe that hours passed. It’s putting your heart and soul into arranging a present for someone that they hardly appreciate or never use...

Our natural response to this is to get discouraged. We ruminate on all of the other things we could have been doing and that would have been a better use of our time. We feel frustrated because we have so much going on and couldn’t afford to lose any more time, yet we did. 

But the problem is - When you disparage and get upset with yourself about all the ways you wasted your time… You’re just wasting more time and creating even more time debt.

It doesn’t serve you to focus on lost time.

Our way out of any form of debt is to get more efficient with the resources we have available. Rather than incurring more debt and digging ourselves into a deeper hole, we need to offset what we lost with more positive production.

So as it relates to time debt, our solution is to then find ways to get more done in less time. 

Now how do we do that? 

We create efficiencies. We get more out of what we put in by being more focused and organized, by streamlining our processes to reduce waste, and by increasing the quality of what we do.

Practically, this means that when we find ourselves having just wasted time, we need to take corrective action. We need to get right into productive activity that makes up for the lapse we just experienced.

Now this is kind of meta - Preparing this thought for you, I was pulled off schedule helping my Mom with some chores around the house. Not wanting to get behind for the day, I was intentional about transitioning quickly out of that into undistracted work on this. And because I set that intention, I was able to get this done faster and make up for some of the time debt I incurred.

Tony Robbins says “Where your attention goes, energy flows.” So let’s put our attention on the right proactive things to do rather than get stuck on the mistakes we made, making them even bigger mistakes!

If you’re looking to create efficiencies in your time management and daily focus, three of the 9 Super Habits are dedicated to helping you become exponentially more productive. Click here to learn what they are!