10 Common Time Wasters at Work and How to Break Free from Them
So many hours in the day, yet somehow, you’re still drowning in your workload. Your progress feels negligible, and an annoying feeling of inefficiency haunts your evenings.
Time wasters steal your joy of working, job satisfaction, and personal life. Let’s end this toxic cycle, shall we?
I’ve compiled a list of the worst time-wasters that sabotage your workday and come up with strategies to systematically break free from all.
Let’s get cracking!
Key takeaways
- The average employee wastes 21.5 hours weekly in meetings, with 71% of them being unproductive.
- Multitasking is one of the most costly time wasters, as your brain pays a 40% performance penalty because of it.
- The planning fallacy makes most professionals underestimate task completion times by 25-50%. Solve it by doubling your time estimates until proven otherwise.
- The average worker checks their email 77 times daily. That disrupts deep work and creates attention residue that decreases performance by up to 20%.
❗Worried that you can’t avoid time wasters? I’ll introduce you to multiple solutions for each of these time wasters – you’ll find time trackers, prioritizing with a framework used by a former US President, and others.
What are time wasters?
Time wasters are activities, habits, or interruptions that consume the time that you could have been using on actual work and providing value. The problem with time wasters, as their name expresses, is that they’re not valuable – you don’t get any job satisfaction, you don’t complete tasks with these, on the contrary, you get frustrated as they don’t contribute to your growth.
What time-wasting habits do is that these create an illusion of busyness that can make you feel important or valuable in your work. However, the aftermath is that these don’t contribute to your work goals, leaving you exhausted yet unfulfilled at day’s end.
💡 Pro Tip: Feeling like you’ve lost control over your work schedule? Take it easy and try to understand the reasons why you’re feeling unproductive – it may be just a phase in your life in which you’re not that motivated.
10 biggest time wasters and how to avoid them
1. The meetings vortex
I doubt you haven’t sat in unnecessary meetings – those meetings that should have been an email. I used to dread the feeling of staying in these pointless meetings and tried to avoid them at all costs whenever I was in a company that would enforce them.
The average worker now spends 21.5 hours of their working week in meetings. The problem is that studies suggest that 71% of these are unproductive meetings, so more than half of our productive working hours are wasted.
Worse yet, these unnecessary meetings come in a cascade effect: you need to prepare beforehand, and then there’s the actual meeting time, followed by the mental transition afterward, so you can get back to multiple tasks. The aftermath is a productivity black hole far larger than the scheduled time slot.
How to break free from unnecessary meetings?
🆓 Adopt a meeting minimalist manifesto, and run all meeting invites through this filter. Question every meeting invitation with three criteria:
- Is my input essential or will I be wasting time at work?
- Could this be accomplished async in a Slack thread or an email?
- Will this push me forward and advance my top priorities?
For the meetings you must attend, request an agenda beforehand and politely decline those who fail your criteria. Also, it’s best to let your manager know that you’ll avoid unnecessary meetings at all costs and ask your manager to protect your energy in this way, as well as fight to reduce the number of meetings for your team.
💡 Pro Tip: If you can, set your default meeting duration to 25 minutes instead of 30 or 50 minutes instead of 60. This “meeting margin” creates some breathing room between meetings and leaves some time for processing or preparation.
2. Multitasking
Yes, your perceived value is measured by being fast, overdelivering, and doing everything like yesterday. Yet, despite multitasking being glorified at work, cognitive science contradicts it.
The brutal truth is that the human brain cannot multitask on complex activities. The simple explanation is that whenever you jump between different types of work, from writing to design to data analysis, your brain pays a heavy cognitive toll. The American Psychological Association shows that productivity drops by up to 40% when your context switches fast, as your brain must continuously reload the mental operating system for each activity.
Even though you think you’re a brilliant multitasker, this constant mental reconfiguration slows you down both at the moment and depletes your cognitive resources for the entire day.
How to break free from multitasking?
- Implement time blocking for similar types of work. Group tasks that require similar mental frameworks like all creative work in one block, admin tasks in another, and strategic thinking in a third.
- Use a Pomodoro timer for slots of 25 minutes that forces you to work on single-tasking followed by a 5-minute break. During that 25-minute session, stay focused on one task only! Once you’re getting good at it, increase the sessions to 35, 50, and one hour or more. This way, you’re training your fragmented brain to stay productive and shift gears.
- Use an automated time tracker to identify your natural cognitive rhythms. Schedule your most focus-demanding work during your peak performance times and the less demanding tasks afterward.
Find out which of these 10 time wasters is costing you the most hours each week. EARLY shows you exactly where your time goes.
3. Unclear priorities
When everything is important, nothing is. If you start your day with a vague sense of what needs doing but no clear hierarchy of importance, there are high chances that you’ll waste your day.
Lack of clarity on priorities makes you address whatever seems most urgent at the moment (usually other people’s emergencies) rather than what truly matters to your goals and responsibilities. The result is busy days filled with activity but minimal progress on needle-moving work, leaving you with the perpetual feeling of treading water despite working harder than ever.
How to break free from lack of clarity?
- Use the Time Management Matrix to sort incoming requests into Do now, Defer for later, Delegate to someone else, or Delete the task from your list. This method was created by President Eisenhower when he was both a US Army General and then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces to sort his priorities.
- Protect time for important work, not only urgencies. You can’t spend your time only on urgencies, as you’ll not progress with projects that truly matter in the long run or focus on business development as an entrepreneur to foster new client relationships. Give yourself space to say no to work and urgencies and delegate them more so you focus on what’s important.
💡 Pro Tip: Implement a “priority audit” every Friday afternoon to review how you spent your time in the current week. Do you know what ate into your time? Look into your EARLY time tracking data, and check how much time you spent on your top priorities versus reactive work.
4. Poor planning
Poor planning is one of the typical time wasters we face, and this one leads to many wasted resources.
The planning fallacy is a common cognitive bias that leads us to consistently underestimate how long tasks will actually take. We base our time estimations on best-case scenarios rather than realistic probabilities, which leads to impossible schedules that set us up for failure before we even begin.
Poor planning ruins work productivity, as we cascade delays, miss deadlines, organize tasks differently, and so on. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that most professionals underestimate task completion times by 25-50%, so it’s not only you.
How to break free from poor planning?
- Double your time estimates for any task until proven otherwise. If you think a report will take 2 hours, block 4 hours in your calendar. This way, you’re acknowledging reality proven by research made on productive employees.
- Track actual vs. estimated times using a work hours tracker. After two weeks of passive tracking, you’ll have concrete evidence of your true working velocity, and you’ll no longer guess.
- Build intentional buffer time between tasks of at least 15 minutes between major activities. This accounts for the inevitable context-switching costs and prevents cascading delays throughout your day.
- Apply the “multiply-by-two” rule for complex tasks or those you’ve never done before. For repetitive tasks, use your historical data from EARLY to make evidence-based estimates, as these already surface how to build a productive environment digitally.
💡 Pro Tip: When planning your week, deliberately undercommit by scheduling only 70% of your available work hours. This way, you’ll have a “resilience buffer” for unexpected workplace distractions and other dangerous time wasters. Make a time audit to see how this strategy works.
5. The digital rabbit hole
You’ve been there. You open a browser with a clear purpose: to check a statistic for your report, and somehow, 40 minutes later, you’re watching videos about how to plan your itinerary to Japan. That’s not to blame. All social media platforms fight for your attention and are built on sophisticated engagement tactics that capture and retain your time.
But the problem is that the cost you’re paying extends beyond lost time. Each detour creates what neuroscientists call “attention residue”—fragments of your focus that stay stuck on the previous content. That diminishes your cognitive capacity for the task you eventually return to. Research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that even brief digital distractions can decrease your intellectual performance by up to 20% for extended periods afterward.
How to break free from the digital rabbit hole?
- Block distracting websites with website blockers like Freedom or StayFocusd. This way, you’re physically preventing access to digital distractions during work blocks.
- Adopt a “one tab rule” during important work sessions. Leave only one browser tab open at a time that is directly related to the task at hand.
- Create a “research bucket” doc where you quickly dump interesting but non-essential links that you’ll access when you book time for exploration or random readings rather than following them at the moment.
💡 Pro Tip: It’s useful to create separate browser profiles for different work modes. One could be focused on production with minimal extensions and blocked distracting sites, and another for research with your full suite of tools.
6. Perfectionism
That presentation you’ve been refining for days. That email you’ve rewritten seven times. That report with the formatting you’ve tweaked for hours. Sound familiar?
If perfectionism doesn’t sound like a reason why you’re feeling unproductive, stay with me; you’ll understand why.
Being in pursuit of flawlessness creates lower returns because each incremental improvement consumes exponentially more time than delivering a lower quality of work. Harvard Business School research reveals that perfectionists spend up to 30% more time on tasks than their equally capable colleagues, with no measurable improvement in outcomes.
How to break free from perfectionism?
- Define what “done” means before you start any project. Write down specific completion criteria. For that slide deck, maybe it’s “clear main points, all data verified, no spelling errors”—not “the best presentation I’ve ever created.”
- Embrace an MVP approach (Minimum Viable Product) for all types of deliverables. Create the simplest version that meets core requirements, get feedback, and iterate only where specifically requested.
- Set artificial time constraints for tasks that typically trigger the perfectionist within yourself. If you’d normally spend three hours on a proposal, give yourself 90 minutes and commit to shipping what you have when the timer sounds.
7. Email checking
The average worker checks email 77 times daily, at approximately every 6 minutes, according to this report. That’s one of the time-wasting activities that are believed to be productive, but they’re not.
When you’re stuck in constant vigilance, it’s almost impossible for you to go into a deep work and thinking mode. Microsoft Research found that after checking email, workers need an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task, and when they do, they experience decreased cognitive capacity.
How do you break free from this email obsession?
- Create email-specific time blocks in your day, perhaps 30 minutes in the morning, midday, and late afternoon, and keep your email client completely closed outside those windows.
- Disable all email notifications on every device. Research shows that even seeing that an email exists without reading, it occupies your working memory and diminishes cognitive performance.
- Process each message completely the first time you see it using the decisive framework: Delete it, Delegate it, Respond immediately (if it is under two minutes and it’s urgent and important), or Defer it within a scheduled time.
💡 Pro Tip: Do you think that you have poor time management? I’ve written all about the signs of poor time management in this article.
8. Being disorganized
That frantic search for the document you need for your meeting or the frustrating search for digital files with inconsistent naming conventions. The cluttered workspace where essentials are buried under non-essentials.
Disorganization is a systematic productivity vampire that silently bleeds away your effectiveness hour by hour. It’s frustrating, it increases cortisol (stress hormone) levels and depletes the mental bandwidth you need for complex problem-solving, creative thinking, and decision making.
How to break free from disorganization?
- Implement the “touch it once” principle for both physical and digital items. When something arrives in your workspace, immediately decide: use it, file it, delegate it, or discard it—never create a “deal with later” pile.
- Set a “minimum viable organization” system for your most-used resources. Don’t aim for perfection; instead, focus on the 20% of organizations that deliver 80% of the benefits.
- Schedule a 10-minute daily reset at the end of your day to clear your desk, close browser tabs, and file that day’s documents so you start fresh tomorrow.
9. Doing other people’s work
You’re a dependable professional who gets things done, which is precisely why you’ve become a go-to person for other people’s work. That colleague who “just needs your help” with a simple task that somehow expands into hours of your time. That project someone “thought you’d be perfect for” that wasn’t actually yours to handle.
Before you realize it, you’re spending significant portions of your day fulfilling others’ responsibilities while your own work piles up.
How to break free from doing others’ work?
- Apply the “teach, don’t do” principle when approached for help. Instead of taking over, offer guidance that enables the other person to complete the task themselves next time.
- Create clear boundaries around your expertise with phrases like: “I can give you 15 minutes of direction on this now, but then I need to return to my priorities.”
- Document frequently requested processes in simple guides and templates, then direct people to these resources rather than providing hands-on help repeatedly.
💡 Pro Tip: Track all unplanned assistance requests in EARLY for two weeks to quantify their impact on your productivity. Use this data in conversations with your team leader about workload management or to help you identify which team members might benefit from structured training rather than ad-hoc assistance.
EARLY reveals the hidden cost of being the office problem-solver. Track unplanned assistance requests automatically and turn learn to set boundaries that help your whole team grow.
10. The fear of failure
Behind many stalled projects and missed opportunities lurks a big productivity killed and wasting time activity: the fear of failure.
When talking about the fear of failure, you shouldn’t confuse it with laziness or lack of skill. In fact, it’s about the psychological weight of potential criticism, judgment, or disappointment that prevents action. Unfortunately, many of us struggle with the fear of failure, which impacts our decision-making and initiative-taking, and it’s not helping in having a healthy work-life balance.
How to break free from the fear of failure?
- Reframe failure as feedback by explicitly listing what you’ll learn regardless of the outcome. This shifts your focus from binary success/failure to continuous improvement.
- Break intimidating projects into micro-commitments so small that the fear threshold for each step becomes negligible. Don’t “write the report”—just “create the outline.”
- Create failure resilience by establishing your “recovery plan” in advance: “If this doesn’t work, I’ll immediately try approach B.” This reduces the perceived risk of initial action.
- Apply the “eat the frog” technique by tackling your most dreaded task first thing in the morning. This approach, popularized by Brian Tracy, prevents fear-based procrastination from consuming your entire day and creates momentum that carries through to other challenges.
Start avoiding timewasters in the workplace
Wasting time at work can happen to all of us for different reasons, but unless time wasters are stopped, they’re systematically acting like productivity vampires. Time wasters silently drain your effectiveness, satisfaction, and well-being.
The good news? You have far more control than you might realize in these wasting-time endeavors. By identifying your specific time thieves and implementing targeted countermeasures, you’ll reclaim hours of productive time each week.
Start by eliminating just one major time waster this week. The cumulative impact of these small changes will transform not only how much you accomplish but also how you feel about your work.
Sources
https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/09/boosting-productivity
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1364826.pdf
https://hbr.org/2018/01/perfectionism-is-increasing-and-thats-not-good-news
https://www.businessinsider.com/you-lose-up-to-25-minutes-every-time-you-respond-to-an-email-2014-12