People waste their time in a similar way to how they waste things they get for free. But although you haven’t paid any money for your time, you do have a finite amount of it and therefore it has significant value. It should be used wisely.

If you think about it, we have around 1000 minutes to use per day (assuming you sleep for 7–8 hours per day). That isn’t a lot! We shouldn’t be wasting those minutes. Instead, we should think of them like our currency.

If we need to do something, we should think of it as a project and consider how much of our budget (time) we’re willing to allocate to it. You then start to realise how much of your budget you’re wasting inefficiently on needless things. For example…

If you spend all day worrying and overthinking about something that needs to be done rather than just doing the thing and getting it out of the way, you’re wasting more budget than is needed. You’re still going to have to do the thing, but you’ve now lost more minutes in anticipation.

If you over-analyse things and get stuck considering all the options, it’s just draining your time. If the delay was costing you money, you’d make the decision sooner — so it should be the same with your time.

If you are being a perfectionist with everything you do rather than just getting things done, you’re going to waste more of your budget every day than necessary. Some things call for perfectionism — but not all things. You will end up with less budget remaining to spend on other things that could be more beneficial overall.

I’m not even speaking about things you do for leisure, I’m talking about the time-wasting things most people do without realising. These things add up and if we cut them out, we can progress much better and faster, leaving more ‘time budget’ to spend on the things we love.

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