I found that I waste a lot of time. As a person with an entrepreneurial mindset, I believe that I miss out of opportunities when I waste my time. I wanted to write time is money, but part of me says this isn’t true. Money is not everything, and sometimes, the most valuable time is spent with family and friends doing something unproductive, yet fun. Still, I see myself and many others wasting their time. Here are a few ways I used to waste my time and sometimes still do:

1. TV – I used to watch an immense amount of TV. In college, I really cut down on this because there are many other more entertaining ways to spend my time (ie. hanging out with friends, parties, extracurricular clubs, sports, etc) However, my first big purchase after I got my job was a large flatscreen LCD TV. Since then, I watch almost an hour of TV every night before I go to sleep. I find it as a way to relax from a hard day of work, but it is now starting to become a habit that I think is mindless and wasteful. My goal is to start cutting back on watching so much TV.

2. Youtube – Before I got busy with work, this blog, my business, and real estate, I used to waste countless hours and entire nights watching videos on youtube. This can be a very fun time as we find plenty of entertaining videos to watch. When I think about it though, I find that I have gotten nothing out of watching those videos. I didn’t learn anything, I didn’t help anyone, I didn’t increase my income, and I certainly don’t remember any of those videos.

3. AIM/Gchat/Online Chats – When I was in high school, I used to chat on AIM constantly. I really loved talking to all my friends and I still do. This continued into college until one day, in my second year of college, one of my best friends, Rich, sent me a link or something to download and my buddy list just blew up. I lost all my contacts and never felt like replenishing my buddy list. So, thanks to Rich, I only use Gchat to communicate with friend on occassion. As much as I love to keep in touch with friends, there are other medians to do this (ie. email, facebook, calling). I’m historically very bad at keeping in touch, so hopefully my friends understand that and don’t hold it against me. Still, I have found that not being on AIM/Gchat has given me a few more hours each day to be productive. Give it a try, take a week off from chatting online and see how much more you can get done.

What are your time wasters?