Time Thieves And Distracting Factors

Time thieves are the hindrance in effective time management. These need to be removed or avoided by using time management strategies. Some of the distracting factors that steal time are listed below:

Attitude: A bad attitude makes the executive waste his day on problems rather than solutions, wasting their time.
Delegation of work: An executive not delegating the work properly down the line wastes valuable time in doing the work which can be done by subordinates. Thus loosing time on major areas like planning for the long run.
Interruptions: Interruptions like phone calls, visitors, confusion and poor communication and unnecessary meetings while doing work, occur due to lack of co-ordination, planning, eating up time like a thief.
Planning: Executive poor at planning and impatient at getting things done, start a chain reaction of unproductive time utilization, leading to unsuccessful attempt to complete the task.
Crisis management: It is a result of lack of work done without assigning or prioritizing tasks. Thus leading to confusion between urgent, important and unimportant tasks and most likely the unnecessary task may be done first at the cost of really required tasks to be completed. Consequently the executive may not ge t enough time to do other tasks.
Shuffling blues: It is disorganization of things. Wasting of time in finding things in a clutter, all because of unscheduled day planner.
Networking: The executive's poor relationship with other employees and colleagues .i.e, poor networking in working environment will cause wastage of time, as it closes the door of opportunities to get the work or task done.
Meetings: Unnecessary meetings conducted without special purpose are thieves of time and unproductive.
Procrastination: Some executives procrastinate while performing tasks, thus putting off important tasks for later, piling up work and finally make them run with little time in hand to complete the priority task.
Negative people: Executive's surrounded by negative people, waste their time, as these people will create only problems and getting no output from them, is nothing less than time thieves.

All the above time thieves distracting factors can be rectified with proper planning, scheduling, good relationships and a positive attitude, leading to effective time management.