You’re happily working on something, but something’s not right.

It feels as if you never have enough time to do what you’re doing.

You know there’s a drain or leak somewhere, but you just can’t seem to spot the culprit….

In this post I uncover a few ways to know when something in your life, be it a task, project or other commitment is truly draining away your time.

You’re constantly reinventing the wheel. 

If you’re constantly figuring out how you created formulas in a spreadsheet, or coming up with questions for regularly scheduled interviews (two things that you may have done just a few days ago), well, it might be time to put an end to the madness. You’re unnecessarily wasting a whole lot of time and energy!

Look for tasks or actions that seem to take longer than they should for the time you spend working on them. Do you run around the house for ten minutes each day before work or school looking for your bag, then your cellphone, wallet, keys and everything else you’re trying to remember you need? Why not make a cheat sheet of items you need to have with you and tack it to the back of your front door? A few minutes of prep will save you from wasting your time in future.

You…and your calendar…are blocked at every turn.

You’re looking to find some free space in your calendar and that same scheduled item keeps popping up in your face, time and time again. This item is literally prohibiting you from doing other things that you want to do in your life. Do you need to have so many instances of this item scheduled item in your calendar? For example, can errands be streamlined or a meeting abbreviated? Do you really need to meet twice a week for your book club or would once a week or even once a month suffice? In some cases you might not be able to remove the item completely from your schedule, but you might be able to reschedule it for a different time in your calendar so you can free up some other time slots in your schedule.

TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR CALENDAR.

The Order Expert’s Guide to Time Management is a hands-on workbook that provides practical solutions to common, everyday time management problems.

Click here to learn more about the workbook >> 

You’re using up too many resources for the actual action or result.

We use a lot of resources each and every day to achieve basic tasks. Just consider the time and energy it takes to prepare yourself, review materials and travel to different appointments or meetings on any given day. Are you putting in way too much time for something that’s not really worth it? Is the time you spend traveling to a social function you’re not really that interested in more than the time you actually spend at that function? Are you resenting the trip, the function itself or anything that’s remotely related to it? It might be time to sit down and reevaluate your priorities. Consider the effort you are putting into the action and the end result; does it seem to be balanced or is it more heavily leaning towards one side than another?

How about you? Have you recently spotted a time drain in your regular schedule? What do you suspect the problem to be? Join in the conversation and leave a comment below!