Spending ‘time’ habits

July 23, 2015

I read an article today on Linkedin that got me thinking…it was called ‘4 Weird Time Saving Habits of Highly Successful People’ , written by a woman named Betty Liu who is a Bloomberg TV presenter and business journalist. I often read articles on Linkedin and while most are interesting, they rarely stick. But today, this one did.

In the article, Betty talks about saving time and some unusual ways for time saving that her highly successful friends have shared with her throughout the years. Some of the ideas were perfectly logical to me, such as making sure that you reply to all of the previous working day’s emails by noon the following working day, allowing yourself to then turn your attention to the upcoming work and not keep being dragged into things that should have been closed off yesterday.

Tips like this are useful and nice to know but there was one nugget in particular that stuck in my mind – Betty quit taking sugar in her coffee!

Not for health reasons and not because she didn’t like the taste but because of the time it took. ‘Such an odd statement!’ I thought. Or is it?

Betty describes how she repeatedly waited in line at the Starbucks for her coffee each day and after a while, spending a few extra seconds trotting over to the condiments to put two packets of sugar into her coffee and stir, started to seem like a few extra seconds too many.

Betty decided to quit that step and save herself time. After all, a few seconds a day adds up to a minute or two a week, and over months or years, adds up to something substantially bigger.

I don’t know why it stuck out in my mind so much, maybe it’s because my Mum has always told me, ‘You can’t save time, you can only spend it wisely.’

It got me thinking about my own daily habits, even simple things like the few extra minutes I laze around in the morning. Am I wasting precious time that I could be channelling into something more productive elsewhere in my day?

Can I save time in certain areas of my daily routine, that I could spend later that day on something more productive, fulfilling, or even fun?

Betty reminded me today that once time is gone, you can’t get it back and she has inspired me to not only apply this to my personal life, but my working life too.

Maybe sometimes, we all need to look at our spending habits…

Emily Hughes