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Imagine that you are given $86,00 every single day.

The catch is that you cannot bring forward or carry over any of it. You can spend it all, but whatever you have left over from your spending that day is removed and you will never get it back. The next morning, another $86,000 is deposited to your account. What do you do? You spend as much as you can! Of course, using this bounty to improve your life would be the best use of it. The thing is we all get 86,000 every day. Not in dollars, but in a far more valuable resource – time. Every day we all have 86,000 seconds to spend and not a second can be deposited or withdrawn to or from tomorrow. But, just like the money we have, far too many of us waste our time on things with little to no value. Here are a few ways that people waste time.

Daydreaming

Thinking about the future is something that we all do, but not all of us do it in a productive manner. If you are working towards a big goal and you spend some time to visualize yourself achieving that goal as a way to stay motivated, then that is a good use of time. However, if you spend your time daydreaming about winning the lottery and/or living the good life without doing anything to progress towards that vision then you are just fantasizing and wasting time.

Thinking About the Past

I’m sure you have had this happen to you, as it has certainly happened to me. You are doing something and suddenly you start thinking about an embarrassing or otherwise negative situation from your past. I don’t know why our brains love dredging up these old events that we would rather not revisit, but it does. Learn from your past, don't live in it. The past must be integrated, it cannot be wished away, but it also should not be allowed to devour the future. Today is tomorrow's past, don't spend it reliving yesterday.

Striving for Perfection

Are you a perfectionist? Is nothing ever ‘good enough’ for you? Perfection is probably not even possible, but trying to get there will certainly take a lot of time. The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule which states that 20% of the input creates 80% of the result, can be applied here. You can achieve a high standard (80%) of work quality using only 20% of the time that ‘perfection’ will take. You can get so much more done if you don’t chase perfection and, instead, accept ‘good enough.’ You don’t even need to apply this to all things in your life to realize huge time savings. Try just being ‘good enough’ in the smaller and less important tasks of the day so that you can focus your efforts into making the big, important task the best that you can.

Conclusion

Your time needs to be considered the most precious asset that you own. Even small daily time savings will add up. Consider that just 5 minutes per business day for a year will add up to over 20 hours. That’s 2 and a half 8-hour days! Half a week back from just 5 minutes per day.