Five Steps to Quit Wasting Your Time

How to read more, write more, and enjoy more.

St. Jerome in His Study by Joos Van Clevel

Your life’s purpose is lived out in action. In practice, finding what you’re meant for means finding what you’re supposed to do with your time. Of course, there’s a broader sense of your “life’s work” than just a career or a passion: it’s about becoming the person you’re meant to be.

Although you live out this purpose in action, it’s rarely learned or understood through action. Instead, it’s in the moments spent away from work that you have a chance to reflect and understand what life is for. When you have nothing you need to do, you can learn what’s worth doing for its own sake.

We focus on meaningless work, but where does this meaninglessness start? The main enemy of purpose in most lives isn’t pointless work. It’s distraction. We live in a time when there is never any need to be bored—if you’re always occupying yourself with something, there will never be a moment to ask yourself what it’s really for.

Learning to pay attention isn’t easy. We like the path of least resistance. Reading Dostoevsky might be a better use of your time than watching short-form videos all day, but I don’t think anyone would say that it’s easier to do so—at the very least, it isn’t at first. If you want to get away from distraction and pay meaningful attention, you’ll need to find a way to push yourself through the rougher moments.

Normally, I’d offer a philosophical approach to some of these ideas. (We’ve already written a good bit on paying attention and genuine leisure.) Today, I want to take a more practical approach and ask what to do to start fixing these problems right now. To that end, here are a few of the tips that I’ve tried to apply to my own life to get out of lazy ruts in my own life and focus more on the things that matter.

1. Never assume you’re too special for simple advice

David Foster Wallace once noted a curious fact about addiction: people with higher IQs tend to find it harder to escape an addiction. We often associate a lack of self-control with a lack of intelligence. Yet in practice, it seems like the extra brainpower isn’t much help

There are plenty of possible explanations for this. Here’s one I find convincing: it’s easy for smart people to convince themselves that they don’t need to follow simple advice. Maybe simple rules and habits work for some people, but you don’t really need them if you’re smart enough. In fact, you’re too smart to trick yourself.

This, of course, is not true. The worst way to solidify your bad habits is to tell yourself that you’re too special to get out of them. So regardless of how confident you feel in your own abilities, don’t feel like you’re too smart to make use of the simple things.

2. Get comfortable with leaving things incomplete

It’s hard to leave a project half-done. Opening up a book for five minutes just to put it down in the middle of a chapter is annoying. Taking the two minutes before a meeting to organize your desk feels useless.

But these small moments add up. How many of these little opportunities do you surrender every day because you only want to work when you can reach an arbitrary milestone? Those little minutes will become hours before long.

It’s easy to start dividing the day into your time and lost time. The morning is lost time—that’s getting ready for work, staring at your phone, and throwing together something to eat quickly, because you don’t have enough time to devote to something better. The evening can easily feel like lost time too: if you spent a few hours running errands and getting things together, you probably don’t feel ready to watch a two-hour movie. Then, of course, you wind up watching YouTube for three hours anyways.

Don’t sacrifice those small moments. Take the opportunity to do something worthwhile, even if it’s just for a minute.

3. Quit waiting for the perfect plan

I remember talking to a friend of a friend once about weightlifting. I’d been lifting for two years or so at this point and he mentioned that he’d been looking to start working out himself—like many people, I cannot pass up an opportunity to talk about whatever hobby I’m just beginning to get a hang of.

I asked him what sort of training he was doing, how often he went to the gym, what his targets were—all fairly generic questions, to which I expected generic answers. He told me that he was interested in starting soon, but he wanted to make sure that he had the right program, the right diet, and so on before getting started. He didn’t want to waste his time, after all.

As far as I know, he never began lifting, or at least not seriously. I suspect that he’s far from the only person to make this mistake: wasting his time waiting until he’s figured out exactly what to do. In practice, that plan almost never comes: when you are getting started, you won’t know what to do and there will be no good way to learn.

A good bit of caution can be worthwhile sometimes, but there are plenty of situations where the cost is near zero to start. Don’t put off starting to read because you’re worried your plan is wrong. Read it now, and re-read later if you have to.

4. Find better ways to take breaks

Try this: sit down for a bit and work on a problem. Try to solve a puzzle (maybe a crossword), write a quick argument, or finish a math question. What does your work pattern look like?

At the start, it probably won’t be that hard to focus. When you’re just doing the easy part solving the easiest pieces, you’ll roll along smoothly. But what happens when you hit a snag?

Without even thinking about it, you’ll probably jump to a distraction. You’ll check your phone, go to a different website on your computer, or leave your desk to go work on something else entirely. And, you’ll find, you’ll get sucked up into this fairly quickly.

It’s easy to get work done when you’re on a roll. But when those rolls are interrupted by constantly jumping away as soon as you face a real problem, you’re not going to go very far at all.

Learn to replace the distracting breaks with breaks that encourage focus. Leave your phone in another room. Instead of leaving, pace around, look out the window, or jot down random things in a notebook. Turn your momentum breaks into moments for recollection, not a time to go off on some random tangent.

5. Stop setting unachievable goals

We’re all motivated by results in the end. We want to see the proof that our work is paying off: we want to see progress in the gym, fill our Goodreads and Letterboxd accounts, and communicate to others that we are getting ahead.

But, in the process, we wind up setting goals that are far too much to achieve and falling off right away. I’ve met plenty of friends who wanted to read 50 books in a year and wound up falling off at six (and I’ve done that on plenty of occasions in my life). I’m reminded of the advice to shoot for the moon and land among the stars. The issue is that most people start with moon-sized ambitions but balk at moon-sized efforts. It’s hard to jump straight from zero to 100.

Focus on tangible goals. Think about the process: if you’re learning an instrument, combine milestones like learning songs with process-focused goals like practicing for a certain amount of time a day. Build up effort over time and get small wins: try to have a combination of long-term milestone goals and short-term process-first goals.

You can’t hope to achieve all your goals overnight—therefore, don’t try. Set a goal you can achieve today, a goal you can achieve this week, and a goal you can achieve this year. This is how you build a habit.

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I am still horribly guilty of wasting my time plenty often. Still, I have learned over time that I am just as vulnerable to the same traps as anyone and that I can escape them the same way that anyone else can. Perhaps the worst instance of breaking rule 1—thinking you’re too special for the rules—comes when you try something once, don’t see it work, and decide to quit right away. Try to fix things, make mistakes, and try again anyways. With patience, you will make it to the other side.

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