Eliminate Time-Loss Factors to Gain Power Back at Work

Developed from the ProThink Learning online course Time Management: Recapturing Lost Time

Regardless of your position at work — whether you’re an employer, an employee, a manager — we all struggle with time management in our own way. We’ve discovered that our fundamental issue is not that there is a shortage of time in the workday to get things done, but rather that there is a surplus of interruptions by our Time Bandits. Regardless of the tools we might use to manage our workload, we don’t control interruptions, and thus we concede control of our time to whomever or whatever shows up to claim it. We set out to find the sources of these interruptions to nip them in the bud and discovered what we call the Five Time-Loss Factors. We then developed a unique tool to get a clear idea of just how much of our time gets lost to them.

What Is a Time Bandit?

It may come as a surprise to know that you are somebody’s Time Bandit. We all are. We have all been guilty of stealing time from those around us by interrupting people when they are trying to get something done.

Bandits wear masks to disguise themselves, and Time Bandits wear the most innocent disguises. They appear as our friends, our family, our co-workers, our customers, our bosses.

They are also innocent of intent. The people in your life don’t intend to steal from you. But if they interrupt you while you are trying to get something done, steal from you they do. These interruptions steal your time in five insidious ways, which we call the Five Time-Loss Factors.

What Are the Five Time-Loss Factors?

They include:

1. Interruptions

An interruption is anything that disrupts your workflow, no matter the source. It might come in the form of a colleague asking your opinion. You take the call, do the research, call the colleague back, convey the answer, and wrap up with various polite phrases. What might seem like a harmless break from your workflow can take up a surprising amount of your time.

2. Restarts

A restart is the effort involved in getting back to where you left off prior to an interruption. Sometimes it may involve no more than shaking off the interruption, getting back into the previous frame of mind, recalling the train of thought, and taking up the right tools again. A restart involves the proverbial “Now where was I?” question.

But sometimes it takes a much greater effort. Maybe the website you were on timed out, or the people you were talking to dispersed, or you forgot the idea you were about to record, or the customer walked away, or the inspiration disappeared. Time and effort are expended to do no more than get you back where you left off — there is no added value for all that time and effort.

3. Momentum Loss

Although harder to quantify than time wasted due to restarts, time forfeited due to loss of momentum is just as insidious as time lost in other ways. Momentum is what you develop provided you are not interrupted when you are doing repetitive tasks.

The more we do repetitive tasks without interruption, the more momentum we build. Our momentum grows and grows when left uninterrupted, so we get faster and faster and more accurate.

Yet often, just when momentum brings you to the peak of your efficiency, someone knocks on your door, comes to your desk, or calls you on the phone and says, “Hi, I’m your Time Bandit, here to break your momentum. How am I doing?”

After the Time Bandit extracts their ounce of time, you have to lay the groundwork again to regain your momentum.

4. Do-Overs

Who isn’t more likely to make mistakes and then struggle to regain momentum when they are thrown off course by interruptions? It’s a perfect environment for poor quality and flat-out errors. Then you must consider the time it takes to have someone point out your error, the time you spend to apologize and promise to fix the issue, the actual reworking of the problem, and the resending of the corrected work to wherever it has to go. Do-overs can easily take twice the amount of time as doing it right the first time.

5. Distress Manifestations

Interruptions create distress, and it shows up in many ways. These manifestations may be subjective, varying significantly from person to person, but they do exist, and they are harmful. The symptoms include

· mental fatigue,

· irritability,

· loss of concentration,

· reduced efficiency, and

· reduced productivity.

How Much Time Gets Lost?

How much of your time is squandered away to unnecessary interruptions? Use the tool below to track your time loss. The results can be surprising.

Give it a try. It is a large amount of time, isn’t it? When we do this exercise, it’s never minutes a day that get lost to interruptions — it is hours.

The first step to improvement is recognizing wherein lies the issue. By getting a clear idea of what is stealing your time and how much time you are losing, you are that much closer to actually doing what you have long vowed to do: find the time you need to do all the things you want to do. You can and will have that time, and you can use that extra time to make your life better. To read more about tools we use to reclaim lost time, see our articles about Quiet Time, and Time Locking. Comment below with your results from the Interruptions Quiz. Tell us which of the Five Time-Loss Factors you lose your time to most often and how you are going to change that!