Where does your time go?

Time passes, quickly. It's a limited resource and the most precious and undervalued asset. As much as we hate to admit, we're prone to wasting it without the slightest awareness of it.

The way you use your time determines who you are. The way you feel, what others say about you when you're not there, how you create value for the people around you, your family, your friends, your boss, your colleagues, the world around you.

A survey by America Online and Salary.com shows the average worker wastes approximately 2.09 hours a day, not counting lunch. This is twice as much time as their employers expect.


Top time-wasting activities

Surfing Internet (personal use)
44.7%
Socializing with co-workers
23.4%
Conducting personal business 6.8%
Spacing out 3.9%
Running errands off-premises 3.1%
Making personal phone calls 2.3%
Applying for other jobs 1.3%
Planning personal events 1.0%
Arriving late / Leaving early 1.0%
Other
12.5%

Surfing the web is the primary time-wasting activity and the biggest distraction for 44.7% of more than 10,000 employees involved in the survey. In Serbia, Google is where people spend most of their time online, followed by YouTube, Yahoo and Windows Live.
Top time-wasting excuses

Don't have enough work to do 33.2%
Underpaid for amount of work 23.4%
Co-workers distract me 14.7%
Not enought after-work time 12.0%
Other 16.7%
Making personal phone calls 2.3%

They say there are a thousand excuses for every failure, but never a good reason. Nicely put for sure, but excuses aside, is it productive to work 8 hours a day non-stop, without expanding your horizons?
Time management at Inbox

Here at Inbox, employees are given complete control over their time. It's results that matter. Normally, we constantly work on our internal process and productivity. To monitor performance we use TimeTracker, our proprietary project and task management software rolled out years ago.

It runs on JAVA and MySQL and has been unimaginably important to us, making it easier to organize tasks around projects, both tiny and huge.
Why is it so cool?

The mega-cool thing about the software is not only the discipline and self-mastery it inspires, but also the statistics that it gives you about what your little empire builds on. These you can print or save in pdf or xls formats to view either attendance reports or reports by employee, activity, client, project and department. This way you get to monitor both time and results.

At the management level, a quick glance at these reports is all you need to know everything that's going on in your business. That simple. Take a test drive. You'll love it.
Conclusion

In his book Starting to manage, Gerard M. Blair says time management does not solve your problems. It reveals them, and provides a structure to implement and monitor solutions. It enables you to take control of your own time - how you use it is then up to you.

Some days are likely to spin out of control. But the truth is you have a choice and probably want to spend your time the right way.

We know we do! After all, it's only 24 hours a day. Wink