Wondering how you can waste more time at work? I’ve got five great suggestions for you:
1. Attend Meetings Without Preparation
Come to meetings unprepared. Better yet, host meetings unprepared! What do I mean by unprepared? I mean no clear agenda, not necessarily the right people in the room, and specifically no primer document to make sure people know what they need to contribute when they get to the meeting.
This is a great way to waste time because you can be sure that the extroverts will see this as their big opportunity to opine and pontificate about something that doesn’t require evidence. The extroverts are in their happy place. The introverts, of course, are going to stay quiet during the meeting, but you can be sure there’s going to be a lot of time wasted when they think of a really important thought after the meeting and reopen the whole decision so you have to do it again.
Going to meetings unprepared is another great way to make sure you’ll have to have the meeting after the meeting, and probably another meeting after that. If you want to waste more time at work, go to meetings unprepared. It is an excellent approach.
2. Add Numerous Communication Channels
Not wasting enough time in meetings? Add 17 different communication channels! Communicating with your team via email, Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, and text is an excellent way to waste time because you never know where to look, so you have to pay attention to all of them. You leave your notifications on, and when you start to get work done and be productive, at least one of them is blipping and binging at every moment. And when you need to find something, “I’m sure I saw that,” you have to go to each of these different places and search, “Where did they send me the thing I need?”
Using a whole variety of different communication tools in a team is an excellent way to waste time at work.
3. Be Open to Gossip
Be the person who is receptive to your team’s gossip. Yep, just that one time at the water cooler, giving them an empathetic nod is all it takes. Now you’re marked. You’re the person who’s the safe place for them to come to vent and piss and moan and whine and complain and whatever else it is, and you can be sure that they will rant at random intervals throughout your week, and you’ll be stuck saying, “Ugh, how do I get ’em off the phone?” It’s an excellent way to waste time at work.
4. Engage in Multitasking
If you really want to waste time, try multitasking. Make sure that when you’re working through your emails, you open one and start to do a task to respond to it, but when you start that task, it requires you to do an internet search, and then you should be sure to follow a few extra links so that you completely forget about the report and that your task was actually to work through your inbox. Yep, multitasking is an excellent way to waste time.
5: Create Beautiful Draft Documents
The last one, and probably my favorite because it’s such a great way to waste time with a lot of panache, is to take an internal draft-type document, something you’re just using as a working document to think something through, or a presentation for an internal meeting, and make sure that thing is thoroughly client-worthy.
Make sure it’s full of gorgeous stock images where you had to spend minutes, or hours searching for the perfect one. Throw in some .gifs because .gifs are hilarious, and make sure that what you’ve done is a perfect, gorgeous, ready-for-prime-time version of something, even though the only people who will see it is your team and it will never see the light of day, it’s just something you’re using to advance the conversation. Beautifying draft documents is an excellent way to waste time at work.
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Now I’m hoping this is a bit of a laugh for you, but I made this list because these are things that I’ve done many times and that I see happening all the time. This is the opposite of using your time effectively. If you have all the time in the world, if you like to work until nine o’clock at night and log in on weekends, maybe all these things are okay.
But if you want to work efficiently and effectively:
- Make sure you go to meetings prepared
- Make sure you streamline your communication with your colleagues
- Make sure you shut down gossip and say you’re not the safe person to waste time venting with
- Try to stick to one task at a time
- If something is just a throughput document, make it cheap and cheerful!
All right, do you want more time management tips? Check out How to Manage Your Time, here.
How to Evaluate the Quality of Meetings
Checklist for effective one-way communication
How you can put an end to gossip
Video: NOvember — 30 Things to Say “No” to to Be More Productive