What are the unimportant things you want to spend less time on?

I’ve been thinking about the quote I used in last week’s post:

Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life. – Brian Andreas

What needs to change so there is enough time for the important things?

What immediately pops to mind is that you need to know what the important things are. I talked about this a bit in last week’s post.

The less obvious thing you need to know is what are the unimportant things? Knowing this can be just as difficult as knowing what the truly important things are.

For me, it’s recognizing that watching YouTube videos over breakfast are a huge time suck and I end up having a really long breakfast. It’s closing my email window and checking it once every couple of hours instead of once every 15 minutes (and doing the same for Facebook). It’s recognizing that there are some social media options that I don’t get and it’s okay for me to not understand them right now. It’s realizing that spending 15 minutes (or more) trying to get the formatting perfect for something that I’m going to be the only one looking at probably isn’t a good use of my time. It’s not picking up my phone to play a quick game, because I’ll spend at least five more minutes playing than I anticipated.

Lots of examples above of what some of my “time wasters” are. I get so much more done when I don’t do those things, or recognize early that I’m starting to do them. And at the end of the day, I just feel better – my attention hasn’t been splattered a lots of different places.

Now it’s your turn. What are the “unimportant” things you want to spend less time on so you can spend more time on your important things?

Share in the comments below.