You’re Throwing Your Life Away

On Thursday afternoon I got a knock on my front door.

Not expecting any guests or packages, I came downstairs hesitantly. I looked through the peep hole and saw that a finger was blocking my view.

Odd…

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Open up,” a man replied.

“Who is it?” I repeated.

“Derek, open the door.”

“Who is it?” I said loudly.

The finger pulled back and there stood my best friend who I haven’t seen in about 5 months. He’d flown across the entire country to surprise me at my front door.

I couldn’t believe it.

.

.

.

Now, you hear stuff like this ALL the time: “If you have hard deadlines you’ll stick to them”. Or, “You can cram 8 hours of work in to 2 hours if you need to”. Or, “You’re wasting time on worthless activities when you work”.

And it’s all true…

But what happens? What do we do instead? We never really do anything about it. We go right back to our bad habits.

Over this past weekend, I didn’t have time (or want) to sit at my computer all day. I wanted to get out and explore with my friend who was visiting the city for the first time.

But I did have some work to do.

And what happened?

I cut every single non-important, time-wasting distracting internet activity out of my work time. And with about 30 minutes a day to crush on vital work tasks… I got them done.

Here’s the moral: you’re wasting so much fucking time on the internet doing pointless stuff. Checking stats that don’t need to be checked. Refreshing email. Refreshing twitter. Looking at facebook.

It’s worthless.

Stop it.

Now.

The world wont collapse if you don’t respond to every email within 3 minutes. Trust me.

And on that note, let’s all stop expecting people to respond to emails that aren’t time sensitive, WAY too long, could be solved with a google search, and don’t have any clear call to action.

This is the best video I’ve seen on cutting the crap and getting productive: Focus Finder by Dean Jackson (nothing to buy, 50 minutes of greatness, Dean Jackson is the MAN).