TIME OF YOUR LIFE

How To Keep The Time-Wasters From Taking Over Your Life

by Rachel S.

The most important thing you have in your day is your time. How you apply and wield that time will determine the course of your life.

How much of your time are you spending on what you want to do, versus what other people want you to do? In the age of email, text, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and what I like to call the Insta-Ask, all your time can and will be taken up by other people if you let it.

You can't let it.

I have actually been the time-waster of which I speak - which means I know the secret to disarming or at least neutralizing them, hopefully with no tears.

Okay that was time spent reading 113 words that you’ll never get back. Let’s get to it.

1. The Long Emailers

You know the type — why say it in 50 words when you can say it in 800? Hi, I’m Rachel, and you may have emailed with me. There are three ways to handle this person:

(a) Answer inline — If you actually care about what they’re saying and want to respond, put your responses in all-caps in the body of the email. This will efficiently impart information in the most reader-unfriendly way possible and signal that you are thisclose to punching them.

(b) Skim it, then reply quickly to whatever stuck out as important. If you missed something they’ll say so.

(c) Ignore. You are busy.

There are a few ways this can backfire on you. If they are diabolically good at office politics or romantic self-sabotage, they might have deliberately buried crucial intel in a long, rambling email. (Also, if you are dating this person and they send you a long email and you ignore it, just know that they are counting the seconds it is taking for you to respond and there is likely an explosion in your near future.) Sometimes it works to wait a bit and then write a new email saying, “I read your email and want to respond in full — more soon.” The deliberate ambiguity of “more” and “soon” should buy you some time.

Otherwise, know that the Long Emailer is writing as much for themselves as for you. They have thoughts and feelings and clever references that must come out, and you are the closest person around to receive them. It’s okay. They’d love the feedback but they also just love that you are there to share with. If you’re not, alternate steps 1 and 3.

2. The Multi-Messagers

You are not dating them, and they did not give birth to you. Even so, the Multi-Messagers somehow manage to be in touch with you more than any other person in your life. Just thought you’d like to see this! Do you know her? Should we try that? Double-checking to make sure you didn’t miss this! Is it raining where you are? Look! A pony! Whatever you may be doing, you can count on it being interrupted by this person via email, text, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, God forbid, phone. For whatever reason, you are uppermost in their thoughts, and they have a lot of thoughts. You only have one: LEAVE ME ALONE.

They write because they care, and once the vein stops throbbing in your temple you can concede that their intel is often useful. Your best strategies:

(a) Put their email in a folder that skips your inbox. There, that’s one less place where they will be forcing themselves onto your eyes. Check it when you remember (don’t worry, they will soon remind you via another platform).

(b) Pick an inbox. Only reply to messages sent there.

(c) Ask them not to ping so often. Be direct. Or, if that’s too fraught, be indirect, as in “I wish I had a dollar for every email you send me, because then I’d have a lot of money and also please leave me alone.”

(Recently I had someone text me *during* an email exchange. Please only do that if I end our conversations with “Love you!” Because only people who love you will tolerate that kind of solipsism.)

3. The Needsters

Hi can I pick your brain? Wanna have coffee? Or the worst: Wanna havebreakfast? (Noooooo never breakfast!) It is important to give back, yes, but if you are rising in your career over time, you will also notice that the number of requests for your time is rising, too. You are not onlyallowed to say no, youmust, unless you are Hermione Granger and McGonigal just gave you the time-turner. Here are three easy ways to address these requests:

(a) The open-ended ask: “Hi I would love to sit down and pick your brain.” If you want to be helpful, you can say, “Happy to meet you but my schedule is keeping me in the office. Shoot me your top two most pressing questions and I’ll try to answer them.” If they are good questions maybe you can have a chat, but either way you’ve cut off their open-ended query and limited the expectation about how much time you will spend responding . Or you can say, “Sure! My rate is $450 per hour, plus snacks. I’d love to help you!” It is amazing how considerate people become with your time once they have to pay for it.

(By the way, it is okay to not always want to be helpful. Use your judgment. Life is short.)

(b) The quick ask that will take you five minutes and save them three hours: How can you not do this? It only takes five minutes! True, but you only have 288 of those 5 minute blocks in each day, and 96 of them are spent sleeping, 18 of them are spent eating, and probably another 36 are spent showering, brushing your teeth, commuting, running errands, visiting the bathroom, opening mail, and other things that just take up time in your life. Plus you’re allowed to go to the gym, have hobbies, read the news, have a social life and catch up on “Orange Is The New Black.” Somewhere in there, you’re supposed to work at your actual job which pays you the money for rent, food and that Netflix subscription. So, do you really have five minutes to spare, when Death lurks everywhere? That’s up to you and how paranoid you are about Death lurking everywhere.

(c) The person you’ve said no to so much you feel guilty: “We should get together” can mean lots of things on a scale of “We should get together!” to “We should never get together!” Sometimes good intentions are thwarted by timing — and sometimes, you really just have no desire to have lunch with that person. In the case of someone who has asked so often that it’s now getting uncomfortable, stop for a second and acknowledge that discomfort. This person has put you on the spot and you’re feeling awkward. Great. Now go ahead and excise it from your decision-making process. Now apply the same calculus you’d apply to any ask — is this worth my precious and limited time? — and decide accordingly. Remember, Death is lurking everywhere.

(Also, it goes without saying that the person doing the asking should pay for lunch. It is truly the height of obnoxiousness to badger someone for a meeting and then expect them to pay for you.)

There are more - The Twitters! The Chatty-Texters! The Favor-Danglers! The IRL-Link Baiters! - and you can find them all here in the full version of this post. There, now you get to decide if it's worth your time to read it. After all, Death lurks everywhere.

Rachel Sklar is the founder of Change The Ratio and The List. This post was originally published in full at Medium. You can browse her other posts here. Or skim them. You're busy.