How Can I Waste Time? Let Me Count Thee Ways

My dear high school friend, Elizabeth over at My So Called Crazy Life, posted about time yesterday. She said that there never seemed to be enough hours in a day. Boy, don't we all feel that way, sometimes?!?!

I just finished Donna Otto's book, Get More Done In Less Time. In it, she too, talks about how women constantly tell her at her seminars how they feel that there isn't enough hours in a day to get done everything that needs gettin' done. She suggests that we actually waste more time than we realize. She offers up the following challenge:

Record everything you do for an entire week and add up the hours.

I am going to take this challenge and challenge all my readers to do the same. (I'm not sure how many of you there are, but I get an average of five ladies who regularly post - or at least read - my blog. I'm talking to the five of you. If more of you are lurking (that's okay, chances are, I'm lurking your blog, too, take this challenge as well).

Starting Sunday night (because for some reason the week starts on a Sunday, although in my mind it starts on a Monday), I want you to keep track (as best you can) of what you do every waking minute of the day for seven days.

That means if you watch two of your favorite reality TV shows every night for a week (let's assume you TiVo'd them and you have a lot of catching up to do), you will have spent 14 of your 168 hours watching TV. Did I really spend fourteen hours watching the Boob Tube? Yes, you did. Own up to it.

The idea in this exercise is to see how much time we actually waste doing fruitless activties and once we know them, we can work on making the most of our day.

I will post stats at the end of my blog posts each day next week so y'all can keep up with me. I can tell you right now that most of my time will be spent on this infernal machine. (I've grown quite addicted to blogging). For you, it might be watching TV. Or sewing. Or reading. Whatever it is, I would love it if you'd share with me how you spend the most of your days.

Maybe, together, we can tighten up our ship and start accomplishing some of goals that 'we never have enough time to do'. I suspect we have plenty of time to do them, we just choose to get side tracked with other distractions - computer, TV, reading, etc.

I'll be adding a button to my side bar. Take it and link to this post. (If you don't know how, I'll walk you through it. I won't be able to do it all awesome-like because I don't know java script...but I'll try to make it as cool as I can make it).

You've got a couple of days to really think about this and decide if you want to take on this challenge. You might as well try it. What's the most that can happen? You realize how much time you really waste?