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Timewasters

5 of the Biggest Timewasters in Business to Avoid

5 of the Biggest Timewasters in Business to Avoid

Imagine yourself approaching the finish line of your financial year. Your goals for this year seemed clear and easily achievable. But before you know it, you’re cut short. The year is over, you’ve made little progress and you’re left dragging your feet back to the drawing board. Many factors may be contributing to your stunted growth. But you may have not considered one common silent killer, being timewasters in business.

These can creep up on you since they’re subtle and easy to miss. But when they’re dismantled properly you can reap the benefits of improved productivity, less stress and anxiety, higher quality of work, and better employee satisfaction. This might be just what you need to make it over the finish line in record time.

5 of the Biggest Timewasters in Business:

To help you get on the right track we’ve compiled a list of the major timewasters in business and what you can do to avoid their silent attack.

1. Unnecessary Meetings

When faced with any issue, big or small, it’s common that our knee-jerk reaction is to gather everyone into a boardroom and hash it out. This may seem productive at the time, but not every meeting is necessary. While meetings are a great space for collaboration, engagement, and innovation they also come with their setbacks.
In fact, a survey found that 67% of employees say that spending too much time in meetings hinders their productivity. Often, we’ll include employees with some link to the issue at hand but aren’t vital for the problem-solving process. Another catalyst for time-wasting is not having a clear goal for your meeting. Without a strict plan, the meeting turns into people just chatting and ultimately wasting everyone’s time.

In order to carve out more time for your day, decide whether the meeting you’re about to hold is absolutely necessary. If it is, make sure you’re involving the right people that will add valuable input to the problem-solving process. Make sure you have set out your agenda, stick to it religiously and set a time limit for the meeting.

timewasters in business

2. Multitasking

It’s a myth. The truth is humans aren’t created for multitasking. While you may think you’re getting more done, you’re actually opening yourself up to wasting time. Science has proven that you can accomplish a lot more by focusing on one task at a time rather than all of them at once.

Multitasking can cause you to make more mistakes, produce lower-quality work, and limit your creativity. To get more done while still sticking to a time frame, you should follow proper time management techniques. This includes planning your day properly, prioritising your tasks, removing any distractions and getting each task done in its own allocated time frame.

3. Micromanaging

When running your own company, with many lives depending on you, it’s normal for you to want your business to operate at its best. However, constantly hovering over employees’ or managers’ shoulders can be a timewaster for everyone.
By controlling every aspect of an employee’s work and decision-making process you could end up stifling their confidence, causing them to depend on you for tasks they should be able to complete on their own.

To free up more of your time you should set clear goals, objectives, and examples for your staff, so they know what is expected of them. Communicate openly with your team so you can build healthy and reliable relationships. Provide feedback when necessary. Don’t ask for constant updates but rather set specific milestones for revision. Lastly, encourage employee ownership. This means trusting your employees to perform their job properly and allowing them to take responsibility if things don’t work out as planned.

4. Disorganisation

With the fast-paced nature of the working world, it’s easy to leave some things unchecked to save time. But like a lot of the other timewasters in business, disorganisation has an ugly habit of sneaking up on you and creating disaster.
Some of the ways your business could be disorganised include misplacing or mixing up documents, not backing up information, missing deadlines, confusing important dates, or mishandling client information. Many of these actions may seem small at the time but can be massive timewasters if disaster strikes.

To save your company time, you should make sure you have a reliable organizational system in place that everyone in the company knows how to use. This includes saving and filing documents correctly, using digital planners such as Trello and backing up all documents on a cloud system. Another tip is to ensure every document is stored, labeled, and backed up correctly when it is used rather than doing it later.

timewasters in business

5. Irrelevant Emails

It’s unlikely to make it through a regular workday without receiving at least one email. This reliable form of communication is a great way to notify your employees quickly, cheaply, and in an organized and accessible way.
However, you may be wasting your time by being glued to your inbox. Sifting through emails, waiting on replies and miscommunication can all lead to time wasting. A study found that 28% of professionals spend their time reading and answering emails. That takes up a large portion of your day.

To counteract this, it may be quicker to just pick up the phone or meet face-to-face. Remember, keep these calls or meetings short and to the point to avoid unnecessary time wasting. This cuts down on the backward and forwards nature of emailing and the possibility of miscommunication creeping in. Ask yourself if the email you’re about to send is necessary and if it is a top priority for you and the person you’re sending it to.  

Further steps you can take

Once you’ve got ahold of these business time wasters, you may start to see an improvement in your company’s daily productivity. However, there may be timewasters in business that you aren’t aware of, or that we haven’t mentioned that are specific to your business.

Make sure you and your staff have the right time management techniques for when timewasters attack. We offer a Time Management Workshop that covers all you need to know. You’ll learn how to identify timewasters and gain valuable time management tools such as setting goals, prioritizing your actions, the 80/20 principle, active vs reactive and so much more. Make sure to reach out to one of our representatives today to find out more. After all, time is money.

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