You like my title? “How I Am Wasting Most of My Time” — I know you’re curious to find out how I’m wasting my time. Should I tell you my secret?
Okay, let’s begin. To understand my secret, you first need to know about my day-to-day life.
Let me introduce myself: I’m a middle-aged man working in the back-office process of healthcare in India. Mostly I work night shift, Monday to Friday, for 9 hours. It takes me around 1 to 1.5 hours to travel from home to office, and the same coming back — let’s round that to 2 hours of travel. So my total is 9 hours plus 2 hours, which equals 11 hours. Some days I get stuck in traffic, which pushes the total to around 12 hours for work.
In a full day, we have 24 hours. Out of that, I’m left with only 12 hours. In those remaining 12 hours, I have to fit in my personal life — giving time to my family and friends, sleeping, eating, buying groceries, and handling other important (and not-so-important) things at home. Once I take out sleep and the basics, what’s actually left over for myself is a lot smaller than 12 hours sounds.
So let’s talk only about those remaining hours after work.
I’m learning nothing new. I’m not doing anything productive, and I’m not earning extra money through any side hustle. Sometimes I waste my time scrolling Instagram or Facebook. Some days I tell myself, “Today I’ll commit to learning something new,” and other days I don’t even try, and I’m not searching for any additional work to earn money either. Most of the time I hear about someone earning good money doing graphic design, website building, blogging, or content creation — but what am I doing? Nothing. For example, when I created this site, I committed to writing at least one post a week, but I failed at that too.
Sometimes I commit to learning something new for free every day and sharing it — I’ve failed at that as well.
Some days I just scroll Wikipedia, picking up random knowledge that has nothing to do with my current life or my future. Other days it’s Instagram, or Facebook, or playing online 8 ball pool.
If I’m honest with myself, I don’t think it’s really about laziness. Scrolling gives me something immediate and guaranteed — a like, a laugh, a new fact — while learning or writing a post has an uncertain payoff that shows up much later, if at all. Given a choice between a small guaranteed reward right now and a bigger uncertain one later, my tired brain picks the guaranteed one almost every time. That’s the actual pattern behind all of this, not just a list of apps.
So that’s everything you wanted to know about how I waste my time.
To fix this, I have an idea: I’ll prepare a Google Sheet where I log what I’ve done every hour. This should help me track my habits and spot exactly where my time is being wasted. I’m turning it into a small experiment on myself — I’ll run it for a week or two and share exactly what it shows in my next post, wasted hours and all.
Where does your time actually go? I’d bet it’s not where you think it is either.