How to be more productive and feel less guilty about where you spend your time

Time has always been an obsession of mine. It makes me feel uncomfortable whenever I look back and realize time has been “lost”. Which has worked in favor of a lot of my clients because I always have a focus on optimizing time spent together during sessions and even more, I encourage my clients to think about how they’re spending their time and energy constantly. 

Time Sucks: We often go about our days with routines and schedules. Our morning routines, exercise routines, evening routines, etc. While routines can be helpful because it allows our brains to go on auto-pilot and not get fried, we sometimes fall too much into routines and end up spending our time and energy aimlessly. That’s where time sucks happen. 

Have you ever opened up a social media app on your phone thinking you just need “a quick break” and before you know it, you look at the clock and an hour has passed and all you’ve done is watch funny videos and told yourself “yes, that’s me!” as you scroll through memes? 

Or when you need to do just “one quick thing” and you sit down to do it. Then an hour flies by but you still haven’t gotten it done?

That started happening to me recently, where I had such a jam packed schedule everyday, but I was left drained and still feeling as though I hadn’t gotten anything done. I had time sucks throughout my routine that I wasn’t paying attention to. 

Here are the 6 steps I took to move past this:

1. Time Audit: I did an audit of my time sucks in a given week. For the blocks of time already on my calendar (e.g. meetings, client sessions, etc.), I left those alone since they were secured and time-bound. But for the other activities I knew I was doing throughout my day, but didn’t have dedicated times, I listed those out:

   1. Instagram

   2. Editing videos

   3. Writing

   4. Responding to texts/emails

2. My Expectation: With this list, I wrote down how much time I THOUGHT I was spending on each everyday (Monday through Sunday). 

3. My Reality: Then, I tracked how much time I ACTUALLY spent on them each day.

4. Awareness: After just 1 week of doing this, I found out that I THOUGHT I spent probably 1 hour each day on Instagram but the reality was, I hit that 1 hour by mid-morning. Those minutes added up so quickly that on average each day, I was actually spending 2 hours. That extra 1 hour of time sucked daily equates to 7 hours each week that was being spent without me intentionally doing it! There were other time sucks too.

5. Align to Priorities: With this awareness, I then referred to my Top 3 Priorities for 2024 (if you don’t have a list like that, come up with one!) and identified which activities actually connected back to my Top 3. For those that didn’t, I either stopped doing them completely, or I created a start/end time-bound block on my schedule to prevent time suck. 

6. Move Forward: I revised my weekly routines and schedule based on the changes above, and that allowed me to spend my “extra” time that I shifted away from the prior time sucks, towards much more productive activities that clearly align with my Top 3 Priorities.