For most people, time management means organizing yourself around the most important tasks or making efforts to squeeze more in a day. Too few pay the attention they should to those little time wasters that can make a huge hole in our time. When we fail to manage these little time wasters efficiently, we actually fail to move forward towards our goals because the energy that easily goes into the former is energy that could have been employed for the accomplishing of the latter.
While getting rid of the major time wasters is usually about our ability to manage ourselves (in terms of energy and prioritization), getting rid of the smaller time wasters is often seen as being about the ability to handle people and distractions. Big or small, time wasters are related to our habits and our routines. When we operate on time wasters, we operate on our internal structure and our acquired behavior. Getting rid of time wasters takes, well…time. It’s a process of undoing what you’ve taught yourself to do through repetition. It takes repetition to undo repetition.