INEFFICIENCY ADDS UP

Maybe I wasn't as productive today as I could've been, but that's ok, right?

It's just little things: a missed to-do, forgotten appointment.?

Your boss called a meeting out of the blue, and as a result, you're forced to endure the next two hours just in case he has a question.?

You have to catch up on Words With Friends because you haven't made a move in 12 hours.?

You just had to beat that next level of Angry Birds. Maybe the new episode of (whatever-it- is-Taylor-Sheridan-is over-marketing-his-name behind) is out.

Maybe you don't feel it today?

Each seems minuscule at the time. So small that we fool ourselves into thinking we are "fine."?

But old habits die hard, and change is painful.?

So painful that, despite the pain, we continue to embrace outdated systems built of workarounds, inefficiencies, and lost moments.?

Systems that don't work.

There's also a better-than-average chance technology is serving as your distraction.?

People freak out when they are more than arm's length from their smartphones.?

As a society, we're addicted to technology and have become accustomed to an ever-present input of data flowing our way at a cyclic rate.?

And I'm also guilty of checking sports news and email at random times throughout the day when my concentration should be on other things.?

My wife laughs at me because I have an iPad Mini roughly the same size as my Kindle Oasis.

To make it worse, I also have the Kindle app on my iPad for times I may not be near my beloved Kindle. She views it as a redundant system embraced by a guy who preaches efficiency.?

What she fails to realize, though, and I fully understand, is that the iPad - although a better device - is full of the very things I don't want when I am trying to read:?distractions.?

At what point do we wake up and realize the costs of our inefficiencies and distractions??

For the sake of this article's brevity, I will forego a discussion of the financial cost associated with unproductive employees.?

I don't want to sound like Scrooge trying to milk employees for every moment they are "clocked in," and, for the record, I am never "tied" to the clock.?

I fully agree with Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson and their book?Remote?when they say, "Release yourself from the nine am-to-five pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you'll see that it's the work - not the clock - that matters."

There is a problem though: more often than not, the work isn't getting done.

You know yourself better than anyone, and only you know if you are "fine" with the status quo. If you aren't sure, ask yourself this: When did I accept "ok" in life and quit shooting for the best?

Think of it like this, if you waste half an hour a day on frivolous or unplanned activities, that is 2.5 hours per work week wasted. I'll keep the math running - it equates to 10 hours a month, 120 hours a year.??

Yes, 120 hours (5 full DAYS) annually of your life are unaccounted for due to goofing off for those 30 minutes a day at work.

Life, by its very nature, is stressful. Quit enabling it, and quit aiming for "Ok" or one of its cousins: good, decent, average, adequate, all right, tolerable...

Take a cold, hard look in the mirror and get to know yourself. Know your distractions and kick them to the curb.?

Start kicking life in the butt, and be intentional in all you do.??

It feels great.

DOL,

Scott...