Brian Tracy says most people waste 50% of their work time on distractions like socializing and internet browsing. He argues that focusing during office hours lets you finish work before leaving, freeing evenings for family and cutting stress.
About 50%.
A very popular New Year's resolution is to achieve greater work life balance. Greater balance between your work and your family. And this is really important because if your life gets out of balance, it causes you an enormous amount of stress. It makes you unhappy, makes you angry, makes you feel insecure, it leads to insomnia. Sometimes it leads to eating too much, watching too much television, and so on. So how do you make it a lifelong habit? Well, here's what we have discovered, is that most people waste an average of 50% of their time at work. In other words, they go to work, but they spend 50% of their time talking with their co workers, playing on social media or the Internet, reading the paper, going for lunch, drinking coffee. And if you ask people, do you waste time? They'll say, oh, no, I don't waste time. But if you videotape a person's average workday, they will be absolutely shocked at how much time they kill without even being aware of it. We call this invisible time wastage. So what you do is you make this decision. From now on, I'm going to keep my word. When I got this job, I made a commitment, a promise that I would work in exchange for a certain amount of money, my payroll. So therefore, from now on, I'm only going to work when I'm at work. I'm not going to talk with my friends or waste time online. Work all the time. You work. Come into work and work all day long. If you make this decision, which will take you a little bit of time because you will fall off the wagon, you'll soon be producing two or three times as much as the average person. You'll be paid more and promoted faster. But coming back to work, life balance. When you finish the end of the workday, you don't have to worry about your work. You don't have to work long hours. You don't have to take stuff home to get caught up, because instead of wasting time at work, you're getting your work done. Now remember this. There's a law called the law of the excluded alternative, where this law says that if you do one thing, it means you can't do something else. This means that if you waste time with people at work who are, you know, your friends and your acquaintances, it means you are taking that time away from your family. You're depriving your family of that time by wasting it at work. So the question you have to ask is, who is most important to you? Your family, where you want to spend time, or the co workers in the office? And the answer usually becomes pretty clear. Work all the time. You work. Let me tell you a little story. A little girl goes to her mother and says, mommy, why does Daddy bring a briefcase full of work home every single day? And he doesn't spend any time with the family? And she said, honey, well, you have to understand, Daddy can't get his work done at work, so he has to bring it home. And she said, why don't they put him in a slower class? The point is that if you can't achieve work, life, balance, if you can't work all the time, you work and get your work done at work, then you're going to get put in a slower class, and that's the last thing you want.
