Time Savers & Wasters | Jupiter@Nite | 7.28.2010

Posted on: July 28, 2010

We’ve talked in the past about how much time people have spent on FaceBook, or how the human race wasted 500+ years playing Google Pacman. We thought we’d dig a little deeper into this topic, and take a closer look at how average people spend their time, and maybe provide some tips and pointers on reducing the amount of time wasted on certain things.

How people spent their time (infographic)
Interesting to compare single peoples’ time with parents, and the employed vs. unemployed.

Show Notes:

Time Savers:

● Use search.twitter.com to find current/breaking info (IE, ISP outtage, car crash, etc)

● Use a news reader to save time visiting sites.

● Cancel your extended cable TV.

○ Switch to entirely on-demand media. Make the world fit your schedule.

● Always plan for an 8 hour work day, or less. It gives you that motivation to get everything done that you need to get done. Great for those of us who like to procrastinate!

● Avoid meetings, seriously.

● Invest a little time to really setup some basic email filters. Why have all Facebook spam emails hit your inbox? Filter that noise out!

○ Take it a step further, create a spam email account purely for signing up for things online. Nobody wants their info on a mailing list for things they’re not interested in.

● Pick your battles! Sometimes we spend way to much time trying to save time… Sometimes it is just faster to do something the hard way and get it done! But whenever you find your self repeating a process/task… Try to find a way to make it as efficient as possible. So you gain a net savings every time you repeat that task in the future.

● Set up checklists for regularly repeated tasks (groceries, party prep, work tasks, etc)

● Clean your air with plants, helps you think better, breath better. Good plants for that:

○ 1. Chinese evergreen

○ 2. Peace lily

○ 3. Arrowhead vine

Become a hotkey genius: (Linux version here, Mac Users check out TextExpander)

● Turn any action into a keyboard shortcut.

● Requires a bit of learning, but for the right people it could save you a lot of time.

● Already shaved time between trains from 4 minutes to 2 minutes, on average.

● Across several thousand trains that is a significant time savings.

Let’s talk about LOST and WASTED time:

Adults spend 200 billion hours per year watching Television