How to find out how much time you're wasting every day

In a lot of occasions we complain that we don't have enough time at our disposal to complete all the tasks we need to work on. We're too busy doing all kind of things, there are e-mails we need to respond to and we also need to relax from time to time. However, there are a lot of people out there who have a lot more success than us and somehow manage to be a lot more productive in the same amount of time. After all, we all have 24 hours a day to do what we need in order to make progress.

So how do we find what the problem is? Well, believe it or not, a lot of times we waste our time on useless activities instead of working without even realizing and at the end of the day we complain that we worked so hard and yet we didn't accomplish a lot of things. The main problem here is that we don't notice how much time we waste and we just live under the impression that we worked a lot more than we actually did.

The simplest way to solve this and to find out how much you actually work is to pay attention to the amount of time you invest into productive activities. You can use your phone if you want to, or you can use the clock on your computer.

Here's how it works - whenever you start working on something, take your phone and set the chronometer to run while you work. Put the phone on the table and do your thing. When you're done, stop the chronometer and write down somewhere on a piece of paper how much time you spent on that activity.

Do that whenever you work on something and when you're done with everything, look at how much time you actually spent working. More than often you'll realize that the amount of time you spent working isn't as big as you initially thought and that you wasted a lot of time on things that won't affect your progress at all.

This happens to all of us and we don't even notice it. Right now I'm writing this article (which is the third one I'm writing) and I feel like I've been pretty productive today. However, if I think about all I did before, I can remember that I watched maybe 5 videos, each being around 10 minutes long. So I basically wasted around an hour or more watching videos on YouTube instead of working.

When the day will end I'll look back at my progress and I could easily complain about not being able to move forward because I don't have enough time at my disposal to do all the things I want, without remembering I wasted an hour doing nothing productive.

We do this a lot of times and we don't even notice. But now you can see how much time you spend on nothing important using the method I mentioned above. Use your phone or keep track of the amount of time you spend working using a clock, and at the end of each day you'll find out how much time you actually spent working and how much time you wasted on things that won't help you make any progress.

This way you can make a few changes and make sure you focus more on important tasks rather than activities that just waste your time.