Image by D’Arcy Norman (license).
“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”
Bruce Lee
The deeper I go into this area of personal development – and perhaps as I become older – I realize more and more how limited time and focus are. And a form of ruthlessness becomes stronger and stronger. A ruthlessness to cut out the pointless stuff so you can spend your precious time and focus on what’s important, cool and fun.
Your focus and energy each day is limited. If you use it on the wrong stuff you will never have enough to tackle to important and positive stuff you want to do. You may not see it now but doing some of the things below a lot can really suck the energy right out of you. And place your focus in places that won’t help you.
I’m not saying that anyone has to be perfect and not ever do any of these things again. But that you can aim to reduce them as much as you can and fill up your time and focus with more interesting and positive stuff instead.
Make a habit of being a bit ruthless with your focus and time. Don’t waste them on things just because you think it is “normal” and what other people do. Or because you are used to it.
Now, here are a few of my suggestions for how you can waste your life.
1. Create drama.
Do you create drama in your life to liven it up? Do you have a lot of conflict in your life? Is a lot of people mean to you or out to get you in some way?
You may be in a rough spot right now. But you may also create quite a bit of the drama and conflict you experience by how you think and behave. A lot of these things are often avoidable. For instance by not taking everything so seriously. Or understanding that you choose your emotional responses and can, for example, walk away instead of turning situations into big conflicts or fights.
2. Lack energy.
If you don’t have enough energy then you won’t have the energy to do what you may really want to do. Or to keep your focus sharply on the right things.
Instead you may take the easy way out because you feel tired all the time. Eating and sleeping right and working out several times a week are three great ways to improve your energy levels. Keeping your focus in the right places can also help greatly with keeping the energy up.
Obvious? Yeah. But so is much of the most useful advice. The trick is to actually use the advice consistently in your own life.
3. Be judgemental and gossipy.
Being judgemental and gossiping about people can make you feel good. Or it’s just fun to share the latest news about someone. But what does it do to you?
Being judgemental makes you less attractive to most people since openness and positivity are two things that people like. Being judgemental also reinforces your own self-image of a person who needs to put others down and judge them to feel good about yourself. It’s a great way to never be able to raise your own self-esteem. It’s a temporary high with a hangover of negativity that can take over large parts of your everyday life.
One tip to help yourself slip out of such behaviour is to focus on the positive in people a bit more and discuss that instead.
4. Think that people care very much about what you do.
This can be a huge time waster. It can keep people trapped for years in their own minds, unable to take action and do what they really want.
The world doesn’t revolve around you. People have their own lives and challenges to worry about. So don’t spend too much time thinking and worrying about what people may say or think if you try something. Just try it instead. You may be surprised by the positive or just indifferent response you get from the people around you.
5. Have endless stupid discussions in your head.
We had a great guest post a while back by Christopher R. Edgar about how people replay old arguments over and over in their heads and get hooked on these mental reruns. Christopher provides three helpful tips for overcoming that problem in the article.
A few other popular ways to have endless discussions in your head are:
- “Should I do it? Or not do it? And what may happen if I do it?”. This is often caused by thinking that people care very much about what you do.
- Beating yourself up. Instead of moving on to the next thing with the lessons you learned from the mistake you made.
My own favourite tip for snapping out of such endless discussions in your mind is to step into the now again. And then to focus on doing something, whatever it may be and just do that. This places you in the now and now your mind is focused on something outside of yourself that you are doing.
To avoid all the pitfalls described above I’d say that it certainly helps to live consciously by living in the present moment as much as you can. This stops a lot of the thought loops and negativity from showing up at all.
And if they do show up you are now conscious of your thoughts and can say to yourself “no, no, no, stop, we are not going down this pointless path again…”. This helps you to avoid getting stuck in old conditioned and unconscious patterns of thought and behaviour that doesn’t help you.
Break out such thought loops or behaviour quickly a whole bunch of times and you may discover that they start to show up less and less in your life.
What are some more great ways to waste your time, focus and life?
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Great article.
I definitely agree with number 4. People are too consumed with their own life and problems to really care about the things you do. Caring about what people think can hold you back from doing the things you want to do.
Related to point 5: Detailed planning.
Life has too many variables to make detailed planning accurate, especially if you get too far into the future.
“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”
Bruce Lee
It’s not Bruce Lee, Ignoramus, it’s Seneca, a Roman philosopher!
I really am thankful for such articles like these. it makes me focus more on what could be done happily than wasting time on predicting other people’s mind about me..
Stumble. It’s 3.30am.
One great way to waste our time is to keep living in the past. Have you notice some people can brag and boast about their achievements in the past yet do nothing to improve their present situation. I believe that is one great way to waste our time
Cheers
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger
Creating drama really is a timewaster…
I know a guy at work who is a testimony to this - he spends so much time making mountains from molehills that it’s been a great reminder to me to keep things simple and focussed.
Cheers for the great tips
-Ross
I agree that planning is a great time and energy waster because if *feels* like you’re being busy, when really you’re just navel-gazing.
Another good one is not knowing what we want - bouncing from idea to idea without actually completing anything because each idea was never fully formed in the first place. That’s always a fun way to waste our lives.
Once again thanks for a nice article.
I’m feeling like in a some kind of turning point in my life – aren’t we always?:) – and am feeling a bit nervous how my professional future will look like.
One thing I’ve noticed about the future, is that you can do X much to help or engineer it, the other part is something that comes when it comes, maybe by something transcendental force or luck or just being in a right place at the right time. But a single thing I’ve noticed is the most important: to have faith that things are going to be good.
If you just keep yourself active and take the downfalls and pitfalls as lessons to be learned, and don’t think that you are being punished of something you’ve done, eventually you will succeed.
And if you are a person who likes to excel yourself, after all this, you’ll probably forget the past failures and successes and the cycle starts all over again, you being a bit more than you we’re in the previous run. Relieving isn’t it?
Thanks for the very helpful post.
Regarding 5: Have endless stupid discussions in your head.
Some people do not limit this to discussions in the head only - they even talk again and again over the same problems. IMHO it is a lack of decision and then documenting it or at least consciously setting the decision so that issue can be archived (to speak in GTD terms).
However, I know that more difficult than doing things right is doing the right things - and maybe this is a reason for many to over and over rethink their not-yet-so-fixed decisions.
When evaluation is done more seriously then decisions are more profound and do not get so easy a victim to doubt with every new information appearing (in the news, by rumors etc).
Excellent article, thank you for these thoughts. Not labeling and not judging and trying to stay as present as possible are the best ways to survive social dynamics, really helps one maintain calm. Your third point is one to always keep in mind.
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, guys!
Vincent: Good point about the past.
Alex: That is very true and can consume a lot of time with no results.
Enoch: As far as I found online, it is attributed to Lee. They probably both said it.
Marko: Yep, a positive attitude is very important so you don’t get stuck in negativity along the way.
Martin: Also some good points. Thanks.
On point 5, my favorite technique for destroying pointless arguments in my head or to stop beating myself up about something is this NLP technique of memory scrambling (heard it from Tony Robbins). Just get yourself in a peak state and go back through your memory as an observer and just change stuff, make it fun, colorful and wacky. Do this over and over in a peak state and you will feel much better. You probably will not be able to remember the memory as a sad or embarrasing one.
Jorge: Interesting tip, thanks for bringing it up.
Nice post!
I am not too sure about no. 1 though.
i find creating a drama works in a positive way for me!
helps me to generate more energy and passion for whatever i want!
Getting distracted from your real goals in life is the most prominent way to waste time. Although you might be very busy all the time it does not advance you at all.
I know many people who don’t even know their goals for life. I therefore recommend to first think about and write down your private and professional goals for your life.
Once this is done, it will be easier to tackle some of the other time wasting things. But knowing your goals will significantly increase your motivation to change your habits and behavior.
http://memytime.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/set-your-goals-for-your-life/
I wrote more about this in the Time Management Master blog. It contains more than 200 concrete time saving tips on how to gain an extra hour every day. These tips can be applied at home, at work or on the road.
http://memytime.wordpress.com/
Thanks for the very useful post.
I remember the story about deaf frog that participate on a race to the top of a tower. All of participant frogs failed except one, that’s the deaf frog. Why? The frog is deaf so it can’t hear spectator’s cheer that say it’s impossible to reach the top of the tower.
The moral of the story is stay focus on your goal. Don’t listen any negative voices around you.
Great article! Sometimes I get frustrated at my children’s inability to walk away from a conflict — One calls out “She’s bothering me!” and yet they’re still both trying to sit on the same sofa cushion. And yet I do the same thing with my grown-up problems, worrying at them like a mad dog. It is both so simple and so difficult to drop my worrying and continue with my life.
As for the endless discussions in my head, I have found that it works for me to ask myself, “is that person here in the room right now?” That helps shake me out of it.