Don’t be  “April Fooled” into thinking things are time savers when they really aren’t. If we’re not careful, these things can be extremely detrimental to our time management.

On my way home this week, traffic had slowed to a crawl on a busy road that was being resurfaced. I could see the construction zone up ahead, and knew that if I could just be patient, I would be past it soon enough. However, after a few minutes, I started to get antsy.

Just sitting in the car and hardly moving seemed like an awful waste of time, so I decided  to try to find a faster way home. This involved navigating across four lanes of stopped traffic, turning onto a new street, detouring far out of my way, and getting a little bit lost. As I was turning around in the third dead-end residential street I had come across, I caught myself thinking, “Ug, well at least I’m moving and not wasting my time on that same street any more!”

Not a Time Saver

I had fallen into a time management trap. It seemed like detouring around the construction zone was going to save me time, but in reality, I probably would have been better off staying on the original street.

This got me thinking: What other things do we do in our lives that seem like they should save us time, but don’t?

For example, when you multitask, is your work taking twice as long instead of going twice as fast?

Are you sending an email when a phone call would be far more efficient?

Is setting up your calendar taking longer than actually doing anything in your calendar?

This week, I am going to take a long, hard look at what I’m doing and make sure my “time savers” aren’t actually “time spenders.” I encourage you to do the same! Let me know what you find out.

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Photo Credit: Digitalart