Remove These 7 Time Wasters From Your Life Then Boost 100x Your Productivity

This will give you an advantage over 99% of people.

Jul 22, 2020

“Focus on signal over noise. Don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t actually make things better.”
— Elon Musk

There are so many opportunities in life to waste your time, so many distractions that can distract you from what is really important.

These distractions are often very appealing because they offer instant rewards that will make you feel good at the moment and make you even more addicted.

However, these distractions also pose a significant problem for your productivity because they distract you more and more from what is really important every day.

If you’re not careful, after a few years your productivity will be extremely low and you won’t be able to accomplish much in life.

In order to prevent this from happening, you must absolutely eliminate 7-time wasters from your life. Your productivity will be boosted and you will then be able to make things better day after day in the way of Elon Musk.

1. Watching Television

Recently, I discovered a chart on the Statista website showing that in 2019, an American adult watches television an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes every day.

This is a huge number, but what surprised me even more was to discover that this time spent watching television has been steadily decreasing since 2014.

Indeed, at the time, an American adult watched television for an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes every day.

This decline can be attributed to the increasing use of smartphones and tablets over the past decade.

Anyway, if you are one of those people who waste a lot of time in front of the television every day, you are going to have to put an end to this bad habit.

Imagine the extra time you’ll have each day to work on your projects, read books or do physical activity.

Reading books will help you clear your mind and do physical activity is a great way to recharge your batteries so you can be even more productive when you return to work.

After a month without television, you’ll wonder why you didn’t get into this good habit before, as the daily time savings will seem immense.

2. Using Your Smartphone Constantly

From a productivity standpoint, social networks are the worst invention ever created. In fact, social networks constantly push you to use your smartphone in order to get that little immediate gratification of new content.

Most people multiply their presence on several social networks which turns into a huge waste of time every day afterwards.

There is something even more serious than wasting your precious time on social networks.

Scientific studies have shown that once you leave your current task to use your smartphone, it can take up to 20 minutes to fully refocus your attention on your task afterward.

The more you interrupt your tasks to use your smartphone, the more you lose productivity.

You must therefore absolutely stop using your smartphone all the time, whether for social networking, reading your emails or playing video games.

The best strategy to guarantee an optimal level of productivity is to set aside two dedicated 15-minute slots for you to use your smartphone during your workday.

Of course, these slots do not include any phone calls that you might have to make, which is the primary function of a smartphone.

You can place the first slot at the end of the morning before you go to lunch and a second slot in the middle of the afternoon when you take your break.

3. Procrastination

Procrastination is the bad habit of systematically putting off until tomorrow the actions you need to do today. This bad habit becomes almost a chronic disease in some people.

Procrastination is a vicious circle that only gets worse over time.

If you constantly put off your actions until tomorrow, you will be standing still and your productivity will be close to nothing.

To get out of procrastination, you have only one solution: you have to take action now.

Initially, I advise you to give yourself an exit by following the 5-minute rule.

This rule tells you to attack the action you have to do immediately, giving you the opportunity to stop after 5 minutes.

In 95% of the cases, you will notice that once you have attacked a task, you will want to finish it and you will exceed those famous 5 minutes.

Little by little, this 5-minute rule will help you put an end to procrastination and your productivity will take a leap forward.

4. Saying Yes To All Opportunities

Some people are so eager to succeed in life that they will choose to be constantly busy with a bunch of unimportant opportunities instead of selecting the right one.

In this regard, Warren Buffett is absolutely right when he says:

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
— Warren Buffett

Successful people like Warren Buffett say no to virtually every opportunity so that they can focus all their efforts on exceptional opportunities.

So you should definitely reserve your “yes” for exceptional opportunities that are by nature rare.

By following this principle to the letter, you’ll have more time to work hard, which will boost your productivity while focusing it on the things that will allow you to accomplish great things.

5. Being a Perfectionist

You want your work to be of high quality. This is a good thing. However, for some people this quality becomes obsessive and they become perfectionists.

Nothing ever finds favor in their eyes. In your perpetual search for perfection, you will lose precious time in a quest for something that does not exist.

There is simply no such thing as perfection. No matter how many times you redo your work ten times, you will always find small flaws in it.

When you fall into the trap of perfectionism, remember what the French writer Voltaire said:

“The best is the enemy of the good.”
— Voltaire

By dint of striving for perfection, you will never be able to complete your tasks and your productivity will be almost nil.

Before attacking an action, you must define when it will be considered complete. Once the action is finished, don’t look for something better and move on.

Finally, if your perfectionism blocks you for fear of not achieving something good enough, I advise you to refer to the wisdom of Confucius :

“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
— Confucius

You will, therefore, have understood that you must take action because what you are going to produce will always be better than doing nothing.

Finally, as soon as you have finished your action, you must move on to something else to remain truly productive.

6. Practicing Multitasking

In terms of productivity, there is nothing worse than people who multitask. What is even worse I find is that people following this practice really think they are doing well.

These people believe that by doing several tasks at the same time, they will be able to accomplish more.

This is a monumental mistake. Constantly switching from task to task wastes valuable time.

Every time you change tasks, you will lose a lot of time to focus on your task again. Your productivity will inevitably be negatively affected.

Multitasking makes you feel like you never finish any task or action, which clearly has a devastating effect on your morale.

By adopting monotasking, you will be able to fully focus on a task in order to put all your efforts into its successful completion.

Once this task has been successfully completed, you will feel a little happiness that will boost you and help you start again even more motivated. This is an ideal effect for productivity.

7. Worrying About All In Your Life

We live in a world where we are constantly confronted with the extraordinary success of a whole bunch of ordinary people. Faced with these many success stories, you might begin to develop a sense of inferiority or just worry.

You will worry about not succeeding as well as the successful people you admire or your close friends.

If you’ve succeeded, you’ll probably worry that you won’t be able to keep up with the best in your field.

There are many reasons to be afraid and anxious in life, but you absolutely must learn to manage this stress that could devour and paralyze you.

The best thing you can do to stop being afraid in life is to give yourself the right to make mistakes.

You’re human and as such, you are fallible. You can, therefore, experience failure very well, as often happens to successful people whom you admire, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

Like these great entrepreneurs, you will make a difference by using your failures to bounce back by adapting before trying again and again until you reach your goals.

By adopting this mindset, you will no longer be afraid in life and you will be able to take action more easily with a free mind, which is ideal for being productive.

Conclusion

Your time is scarce. As you know, anything scarce is precious. You must make the best use of your time if you want to be truly productive. Maximizing your daily productivity will help you lead a rewarding life while achieving your most ambitious goals.

In order to achieve this, I recommend that you remove the 7-time wasters I just mentioned from your life. It may be difficult at first, but it will be a big win if you can commit to it.

Finally, never forget Elon Musk’s advice to focus on signal (your ambitious projects) and not noise (distractions) to accomplish things that make a difference in life.

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