Time Wasters to Eliminate from Your Life TODAY

updated Oct 4, 2023
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Never feel like you have enough time? You can reclaim lost minutes throughout the day that could add up to a lot more “me” time in your evenings by cutting out these time wasters that could be lurking in your home.

Having to look for your lost ______

How many hours of your life have you spent searching for your keys? Your wallet? Your purse? Your homework? Your ______? Having a physical home for every object in your home — and then getting into the habit of putting your objects back where they belong when you’re done with it — is the best thing you can do to combat the lost object phenomenon. But if you do lose something, use the tips below to cut the time down significantly.

Continuously checking on things you are waiting on

How many times do you walk across your home to check on the laundry, something cooking, something that’s drying or something else you’re waiting on? Timers are your friend. And in fact, timers are your friend when you’re doing any type of activity to keep anything from sucking up too much of your time. With a timer you won’t waste time on the continuous checking part and know to go when you’re stuff is finished cooking, drying, etc.

→ Alarms Aren’t Just For Waking Up: These 5 Alarms Will Keep You & Your Home On Track

Making decisions

Does anyone else spend a weirdly large amount of time searching for things to watch on Netflix or what to eat for dinner? Sometimes when you have so many choices, you can get stuck in an endless loop, wasting way too much time before you actually settle on something to eat, watch or some design decision you’re grappling over. So what can you do? Well you can set aside time each week to make your plan for the week so you do all your deciding at once. Or you can narrow down your choices by a theme or an ingredient.

→ How to Decide: 7 Ways to Make Difficult Design Decisions Easier

Perfectionism

Scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing until you’re doubly and triple-y sure you’ve cleaned something. Doing just one or two more things to get it right. Staying just a little bit later to tweak this one last thing just a bit more. Does that sound familiar to you? We’re not advocating that you do a sub-par job at your work or around the house. But sometimes “that’s good enough” can save you a lot of minutes at the end of the day.