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Why are You Wasting Your Time Online?

The first important step is to identify the reasons behind your time-wasting online activities. Is it because you’re bored, nothing much to do? Or do you find these activities more fun than the tasks you are supposed to do? Read Why Do People Waste Time Online at Work?  to find out other reasons.

Finding out the reason is crucial so that you can correct the root of the problem at hand. Write them down on a piece of paper and devise a possible solution to it. If you have nothing much to do, then I suggest you speak to your supervisor to give you more challenging tasks to do. If you find other activities more fun than your job, it is obvious that you probably need a new job which will get you excited all over again. I’m not asking you to take drastic measures here, but ultimately, it’s a choice we make to improve our lives by making full use of the limited time we have in this world.

Identify Time Wasters

The next step is to identify what are the activities you indulge in that is actually wasting a lot of your time. You can refer to this article for a guide on the Top 10 Time-Wasting Online Activities everyone should know!

One key question you should ask yourself would be – will this activity help me to complete my daily tasks at work? If the answer is no, then it is a time-wasting activity you should jot down. If you work from home, then you should ask yourself – will this activity affect my bottom line? If the answer is no, then cut down on those activities as well. Make a list of your very own Top 10 Time Wasters to analyze.

Calculate Time Spent

To make you analysis more effective, you need to find out how much time you are spending on each site. From this alone, you will realize that you are wasting a lot of precious time in a day. How many hours a day? If you are spending 3 hours a day in unproductive activities, that amounts to 15 hours per 5-day-work-week or 60 hours per month. What could you have done in those 60 hours to help you complete your current job? How would you use the 60 hours to increase your bottom line? Jot down your thoughts on how you could better utilize your hours.

30 Minutes a Day

Now that you realize how much time you have wasted, the next step is to cut down on these activities to a specific time period in a day. For instance, you may decide to spend all these unproductive activities to just half an hour a day. You can choose to spend 30 minutes on one website or 10 minutes on 3 websites. But the total amount of time has to be 30 minutes!

It would be good if you could set an alarm to ring when the half hour is over, just to make sure that you keep to your schedule. I have tried this myself. If I don’t set an alarm, I usually go over the time limit without realizing. So, setting an alarm is a good thing.

Go Offline Completely

The final step is to go offline whenever possible. If your important tasks at hand does not require the use of the internet, then disconnect your internet so as not to get distracted. Close your browsers and open up only the documents you need to work on.

For me, whenever I need to complete an article, my most productive moments are when the internet is disconnected and I could complete the article within 20-30 minutes, after research has been completed before hand, that is. If I spend 60 hours a month wasting time, I could actually have written more than a hundred articles per month!

Last but not least, you may not know What I Do to Waste Time Online. But I must confess that my writing target I set each month suffered, as a result. After following these steps, I’m more aware of my time-wasting activities online and cut down on them. Eliminating them completely is probably my next step!