Death By 1,000 Cuts: How You Waste Time

Your flow state is when you find yourself at the peak of your potential, best performing, when dealing with a task.

Some say it takes as much as 30 minutes on focusing on a task to fully reach this state.

Now imagine what happens when you’re almost there or you’ve just reached it and you interrupt it with what seems to be a harmless distraction, like taking your phone to quickly respond to a text message.

You may finish a 1 hour task in 4 hours, by repeating that type of action.

What people don’t seem to understand is that the productivity killer isn’t the actual time investment, but the mental bandwidth (business jargon - the resources needed to complete a task or a project) that compresses itself with each task.

It’s not about the 30 minutes lost going to the market and buying some food (of course, it’s about time too, since that s limited also), but, most importantly, it’s about that mental bandwidth that kills its potential step by step.

People look at time wrong. They measure it the wrong way: instead of measuring the focus investment behind each minute, they focus on the actual minute lenght.

Try and see things like this: a minute lost = 30 minutes of recuperating. 3 hours of full concentration = a full day of sliding into small tasks while trying to accomplish the things you did in 3 hours of focus.

Most effective exercise to do is called “100 units of time”: track where your time goes for a week straight. Every 30 minutes, write down each small thing you did and how much it took you. This way, you’ll be more aware of the actual time you’re wasting.

So many people out there trying to teach you how to manage your time efficiently, when, in reality, what you want to do isn’t more, but less. The real masterful way of dealing with time is you just want to start eliminating.