10 Ways That You Waste Your Life

You cannot make time for anything. You only sacrifice time.

The other day, I was driving to my mother’s to pick my dog up from her after a short weekend trip, and a thought occurred to me. It was about how wasteful most of us are in our lives. When most of us think wasteful, we think of things like how the average American throws out 365 pounds of food a year, people drinking away decades of their lives or scrolling through social media for 8 hours a day.

Even though those things are a part of being wasteful, it goes beyond that. Most of us hemorrhage hours a day, wasting it on hesitating or getting stuck in habits that we have become comfortable in.

Comfort can be dangerous when you’re wasting your life. If all of us had a relentless work ethic, the world would be an incredible place. Most people would rather not have a relentless work ethic. Not having a relentless work ethic has become an almost alien concept to me because many people I hang around have it. It occurred to me when I got a new job and one of my coworkers, who’s a great guy by the way, has been inconsistent about going to the gym at the office. Often I’ll ask him, “did you bring your gym clothes today?”

He told me, “no, I just didn’t. I didn’t want to.”

He didn’t want to. The work ethic I have isn’t there, and that’s okay. He’s the kind of person who’s okay with being a piece in the machine and relaxing every weekend and building relationships with people. I’ll never be able to convince run a marathon with me, and that’s okay.

Do you have the mentality like my coworker, or do you a voice in the back of your head telling you that you can do more? Do you have something in the back of your mind informing you that you’re wasting your life? It’s easy to waste your life. One day, you’ll wake up at an older age and realize that you could have become someone else, and it’s too late. It’s not too late for you if you act now. There’s no room for procrastination. It’s time to take action now.

Lack of Planning

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." -John Lennon

I hate the John Lennon quote above.

Most people that live by this quote read it as a way to let themselves off the hook from planning and to live on impulse. They missed the key word in the quote which is “other.” What does “other plans” mean? It means that you should focus on the right plans instead of the ones that you don’t care for. Does planning the next move of your career make you sick, but you do it anyway? Maybe you’re making the wrong plans for yourself and should look for an alternative route.

If you feel like your life is out of control, it’s great to start with a plan. However, if you start feeling a productive dopamine kick from planning, realize that planning isn’t productive. Planning is planning to be productive. The execution side of planning is often boring. This is because most steps towards a goal are boring.

Getting caught up in the love of thinking about can be a dangerous thing to get caught up in. You’ll spend years of your life wondering why last week didn’t go as planned. Time will be sunk doing the same thing over and over again, wondering why your plan isn’t working, even though it’s likely that it’s you who isn’t working.

After you plan, take a look at it once a week for only 30 minutes. Look at what was and what wasn’t done and ask yourself why. Be hard on yourself during this time. If you just skipped that part of the plan, ask yourself why you skipped that part of the plan. Keep yourself accountable. You know deep down when you’re blowing something off.

Another pitfall of being too focused on your plan is that it can create tunnel vision for what you need to do. It’s a challenge to keep a balance between staying open to new opportunities and sticking to the plan. Decisions like this may not have logic behind them. Occasionally, you may have to go with your gut on it.

Ignoring Opportunities

“How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.” — Paulo Coelho

There are opportunities everywhere in front of us, however, most do not see it. Opportunities open and close like a whack-a-mole game. They pop up and close instantly. However, most of us stay focused on one opportunity or one path and lose sight of the other paths in front of us.

Opportunities are everywhere in front of us, but they are difficult to see.

When I was fresh out of college, I had a gigantic opportunity in front of me. I was getting an opportunity to interview for a sales rep position at a fork lift company. The first interview went great, but was more of an introduction interview. I thought I had the job in the bag and didn’t do anything to prepare for it. I didn’t take the opportunity seriously. At 22 years old and arrogant in my interviewing ability, I bombed the second interview. The interviewer expected me to have studied up a lot on the company, and the interviewer immediately knew I hadn’t by the questions I asked. He called me out on it and told me to leave. I went home with my tail between my legs because I didn’t respect the opportunity.

My career would have changed completely had I got that job. I probably would be making more money now that I do today had I not blown that opportunity. However, it did teach me to never waste an opportunity. I have never taken a job interview for granted to this day. Almost every job that I have interviewed for since then, I have received an offer. Never waste an opportunity. Sporadically, they stare right at you, and you choose to ignore them because deep down you don’t really want to do this.

Opportunities in life don’t often come as a dream opportunity. Occasionally, you have to take the best of the worst options. People may think this is settling for an opportunity, but typically the dream opportunities won’t come up until you take opportunities you don’t want.

Unproductive Habits

Acknowledging the unproductive thoughts and ineffective behavior that you’ve tried to ignore can be uncomfortable. But, stepping out of your comfort zone and choosing to proactively address bad habits will skyrocket your ability to create long-lasting change. — Amy Morin

Habits can sometimes seem impossible to break, especially as you get older. However, it is possible to change your habits at an older age. Half of change is believing that you can change.

What are the unproductive habits that you have today? One of my unproductive habits is wasting time in the mornings. This morning I woke up at 5:30am to go for a run. After feeding the dog and taking him out, I scrolled through social media for what felt like 5 minutes. I checked the time, and it was already 6:20am. What the hell did I just do for the last 50 minutes?

The social media doomscrolling habit is one that most of us can relate to. It’s a hard habit to break out of, and one that I’m still working on it today. Many people have started to leave social media all together because of it. I decided I’m taking a different approach and decided that I’m going to post more on social media than I will consume. I will create more value on social media platforms for people instead of being a bystander of it.

Even though this morning, I fell back into my unproductive habit, the last week has gone pretty well with it. I found out I enjoy cutting videos and putting photos together on Instagram. Maybe I found a way to turn an unproductive habit into a productive one? I’m not sure, but it may be possible.

Poor Time Management

“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.” — Lao Tzu

Do you have a schedule? Do you follow it? If you don’t follow it, then you’ve likely fallen into this mental masturbation aspect of scheduling everything out. While automating some tasks is fantastic, I don’t think you should try to automate your schedule. You need to check in on it sometimes and validate if you’re following it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of having every minute of your day scheduled out only to fall back into doing whatever you do when you’re procrastinating.

Time management isn’t always about following your schedule. It’s about having a correct set of priorities that align with your values. People pleasers can struggle the most with following a schedule because they’re trying to please others instead of looking out for themselves. Imagine if you’re a people pleaser and an acquaintance invites you to an event that you don’t want to go to, and you don’t care for the person either. You would rather not let them down so you say yes but because you said yes, you had to sacrifice working on your passion project.

You may think that it’s just one day, but it’s more than that. Furthermore, you have to understand that there is no making time. Making time doesn’t exist. You only sacrifice time. Imagine time as a jar of marbles that you cannot refill. You sacrifice your time for one thing, and you cannot make it up elsewhere.

If you’re looking back thinking about the time that you wasted, don’t worry about that. You may have to sacrifice more time and energy now in the short term to catch up to where you could have been. You may even do that and wonder where you could have been had you not wasted all that time.

The best advice I can give is to frame it this way: if you feel like you’ve wasted a lot of time in your life, think about the lessons that you learned along the way in your past. If you changed it, you may not have learned them and become the person you are today. It’s easy to think that you would be the same person with more success, but that may not be true. Be proud of who you are now and look to grow from your present state.

Excessive Worrying

“Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.”- George Washington

Worrying is a signal. Nothing more than that. If you have worrying thoughts, it’s because you’re afraid something is going to happen that may or may not happen. Perhaps you’re loaded with debt and cannot get out of the career you hate, so you worry about that? Maybe you are worried you will never find a partner?

These aren’t bad signals to have. They become bad when you’re focused on the worrying instead of doing something about it.

Worrying drains your mental battery if you live in it too long. Often you cannot control what you worry about or have a feeling that you cannot control it. The best thing to do is take some action on the worry, even if it’s a small amount per day.

Are you worried about your fitness at an older age? Start by doing light exercise each day, even if it’s 10 minutes. It may not seem like much, but at least you are starting to do something about it. Even the mental stimulus of working out for a short period of time can prompt yourself to want to eat better and take care of yourself.

If you’re in a position where you cannot do anything about your worrying, then you have to do your best to let it go. If you’re at work, and you’re worrying about something that’s not work related, what good does that do you?

In the past, I’ve found that with worrying, I tend to worry during times when I cannot control the situation and I stop worrying when I can control the situation. The problem with it was during the times I could control the situation, I would often do nothing because my mental battery was so drained from worrying the entire day.

If you’re suffering from excessive worrying, try to find an outlet for it. This is a time in your life where you should procrastinate on purpose. Procrastinate your worrying.

Energy Waste

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.” –Mark Twain

We all know those people who suck the energy out of the room. Energy vampires, as I’ve called them with my friends. They’re the type of people when you encounter them, everyone closes themselves off. Chatter turns to awkward looking around. I had a boss who was one of these people. I would pray that he wouldn’t join a meeting I was conducting. Every time he entered a conversation, the discourse closed off. People didn’t feel safe to speak and started thinking of the right way to phrase topics.

I ended up leaving that job because of him. Whether it’s a boss or a toxic friend, there’s no time in life to waste on people who suck the energy out of you. It’s easier said than done, though. Recently, I started to lose touch with one of my best friends of 15 years. We lived about an hour to 90 minutes apart. The last few times I had seen him was when I went out to see him in my hometown. Then I realized that he had not come out to visit me in four years. He was single, living alone, didn’t have a family and worked a 9-5. What was his excuse? I was tired of wasting my energy on the friendship that wasn’t being reciprocated, so one day, I decided to stop texting him. He hasn’t texted me since then.

Neglecting Talents

“If you concern yourself with your neighbor’s talents, you’ll neglect your own. But if you concern yourself with yours, you could inspire both!”- Max Lucado

I’ve enjoyed writing since I was 16 years old, but I never considered myself to be a writer. I was a B student in English, although the writing portions of tests, I did well on. A career path in writing didn’t even seem like a possibility. After 10 years of writing for fun before to write online. I had wished I had done it sooner, along with my other creative hobbies. I don’t beat myself up too much about it though because truthfully, I didn’t have the opportunity to have a creative hobby when I was in early adulthood. When I was in college, I was excited to have a career because I would have more time to pursue other things.

However, I neglected the talents that I had and didn’t develop them. Instead of being intentional about strengthening my writing skills, I was doing the same thing over and over again. It’s like doing 20 pushups a day without upping the rep count. How do you expect yourself to get better if you do not do a progressive overload?

Neglecting your talents is wasting your talents. Many people get by on their talent without doing anything to improve themselves. Occasionally, they are that talented. Where would they be if they worked on improving their talents? Maybe they’d be the Michael Jordan of their field?

Overcommitting

“Too many of us are over-committing to others and under-committing to ourselves. Let’s stop living at a frantic pace if our hearts are pulling us to a slower, more focused way of life.” — Erica Layne

I might be the king when it comes to overcommitting. I learned this the hard way. When I was in college, I worked a full-time job at Starbucks, was a full-time student and a residential adviser. I decided that during this time that it was a good time to audition for a one act play. I ended up getting a role in it, but I was spread thin. During the time of the show, I was scheduled for a shift.

There was no one to cover my shift. I asked 5 people if they could cover, and no one would swap shifts with me. If I blew off my shift, I might get fired and I needed the job. I worked with my supervisor, and she let me take off on my lunch break for an hour to go do the one act play.

It was a crazy situation that I put myself in. All because I overcommitting and missed a few details.

When you overcommit, things start to fall through the cracks. Even the most detail-oriented person will start overlooking key details that can cause their entire foundation to crumble.

Overcommitment is when people begin to have panic attacks because they start to feel everything getting out of control in their lives. Their body is in fight-or-flight mode for such a long period of time, the next logical step for it to do is shut down.

Overcommitting can look sexy from the outside. You may look as if you’re someone who is NOT wasting their life. However, when you take a peek into the inside, you start to notice that instead of being great at a few things, they’re mediocre at everything and barely holding it together.

Today, I go into the camp of leaving at least a couple of hours of my day unblocked for personal things. If you’re booked from waking hours to sleeping hours, you may need to take a step back and see what you can do to get out of being overcommitted.

Resisting Change

“Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.” — Philip Crosby

I frequently see this in my workplace. I’ll build a tool for the team that I estimated can save them two hours a week. The biggest hurdle with building anything new for the team is always getting everyone on board with it. A few months ago, I built a tool that would guarantee turn a 3-hour task into 30 minutes. The tool was simple, you basically select your customer and copy and paste and it autogenerates all the notes you need. With it being my responsibility to send out the team's notes to the appropriate distribution list, I was missing one guy's notes. I messaged him asking when he was going to need his notes at 8:30am. He replies that he requires the entire morning to do it.

“The entire morning?” I thought.

Then I realized, he’s not using the tool that I built and never has. It makes me wonder how much time he’s hemorrhaging elsewhere because he’s resistant to change.

I’m sure that you’ve had people in the workplace that you’ve noticed are resistant to change. Personally, I’m always open to change unless the people initiating the change have lost trust with me. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the past workplace where companies have tried throwing projects at a wall and seeing what sticks. This creates unnecessary stress in the workplace and can turn people off to change. However, if you are someone who has become resistant to change because of situations like this, try your best to stop resisting. Instead of resisting change, try to be the person who initiates the change. This is how you become viewed as an innovative person and can help you move up in your career.

There are plenty of places outside the workplace where people are resistant to change. This can happen in relationships when people get into a routine and things begin to feel stale. You don’t know what to do, so you keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Don’t do that, it’s the definition of insanity.

Change is essential in life. It is often out of your control, and wasting time resisting things outside your control is futile and will often hold you back.

You Waste Time On Things Outside Your Control

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”- Marcus Aurelius

Control. It makes us feel safe and secure. We want to have control in as many situations as we can, but more often than not, we do not. Control is an illusion. The only thing you can control is yourself and even that’s up for debate.

There will always be a situation in life that you cannot control, no matter how much effort you put into it. I worked for a medical device company in the past. I was working on setting up the inventory for a new account and making sure every detail was accounted for. After we sent off the inventory, I got a call from the sales rep saying that something was missing, even though I was 100% sure that it was there. It created a panic in the office. For a brief moment, I looked bad, like I was careless.

Thirty minutes later, after sending an emergency driver, we got a call from the rep saying that they found the pieces that were missing with some excuse tagged along.

I had to learn quickly to let go of control, or it would stress me out. I could do perfect everything in my field and there still would be problems because I was dealing with other people. You cannot control the behavior of other people, no matter how hard you try.

After a few moments like this, I stopped wasting extra energy on things that were outside my control. It freed me up to work on other tasks, and I excelled in my job. This led me to two promotions and advancement in my career.

Letting go of control is still something I am working towards today. I still have a little distrust in people doing some of my tasks because I worry they won’t be able to do it right. I have that feeling, but I do not let it control me. Even though I have a weird feeling of letting go, it’s necessary. After everything goes okay the first few times, I start to feel better about it and develop trust.

Wasting time on things outside your control will harm you eventually. People will never look towards you as a leader because you will seem to have a distrust in everyone.

A solution to this is to remind yourself constantly about what you can and cannot control.

It can be things like reminding yourself that you can be a good host to a party, but you cannot control if everyone will have fun. You may give your child the right tools to be successful, but you cannot make them a great student. You may be the best at your job, but you cannot control if your boss recognizes it. Furthermore, you may have a burning thought during a conversation with someone, but it doesn’t mean that you should derail it because you want to have a conversation now about that thought.

Letting go of control is to become an expert surfer with the waves of life. You cannot control the waves, but you can control how you ride them.

Conclusion

If you made it to the end of this, thank you for reading all the way through. Most people today are looking for the quick fix and do not want to spend more than 2 minutes reading an article even if they find the information valuable.

Maybe you’ve come to realize that you’re wasting your life in more than ways than one. Instead of trying to tackle all of them at once, choose the ones that are most important to you right now.

Overcommitting to improving yourself can be a sure way to make sure that you never progress. Instead of progressing 1% a day in one area, you may only progress 1% in all areas for the entire year.

Having that spark is significant to get going, but remember that the spark is only kindling for the fire. You cannot keep a fire going with only a fire starter. You have to keep feeding the fire at the right cadence to keep it going strong.

If you enjoyed reading this article, I have crafted over 50 questions to ask yourself to get yourself on the right track. Even if you do not feel that you are wasting your life, asking yourself these questions is critical to not slip into bad habits. Get the free question guide here.