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Week 9 - Bye-bye time waster
One change each week. This week: Eliminate one time waster.
When I look carefully at how I spend my time, it is not difficult to identify a number of time-wasting activities.
I'm not talking about activities that someone might think are "non-productive" because they are not directly related to making more money or improving relationships or strengthening my body. I'm not talking about the hours I spend walking my dog (you can't take that away from me!), or sitting and thinking, or chatting with colleagues. Those things are fun, good for my spirit, and essential to my overall well-being.
The time-wasters that I want to get rid of are those things I do strictly out of habit and that I do over and over every day, and several times a day.
An example: I maintain a few web sites. They require frequent attention, which is OK. On some of the web sites I am running ads by Google. The Google people provide a frequently-updated report on how these ads are doing - number of impressions, clicks-throughs, dollars earned, and so on. All I have to do is go to a special web page and logon, and all that information is there.
My time-waster is checking the ad performance over and over all day long. It's really some sort of compulsion. The important information for me is really the trend rather than the change from one hour to the next.
So here's the change for this week: Check in on the Google ad performance one time each day, and no more.
Does that sound small and insignificant? Small, yes. Insignificant, no. It's more than a time saver. It also clears out my brain so I can think about other things and do other things.
What about you?
- Is there something you are doing on a frequent basis that you could simply do less frequently?
- Would you be better off spending some of that time doing something else (or doing nothing at all)?
- Are you willing to make a small change?
- OK. Go do it.
Ross Runkel, Post Office Box 1031, Salem, Oregon
97308-1031.
Phone 503-399-8028. Fax 503-566-8844. email Ross@LawMemo.Com
