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10 Ways to Simplify and Eliminate Waste in Your Life

Everyone gets too busy. They pile up their tasks, responsibilities and often over-promise while struggling to maintain any kind of work life balance. It’s a hectic lifestyle that many lead and while I’ve written some articles on how to simplify your life and mind to get around this, there are other ways to help address this problem with the work and tasks you face.

I learned a key principle while going through a training course for work and while reading Lean Thinking. The idea is to identify and eliminate waste. This can apply not only in a production environment like the book is targeted for, but in life in general. There is so much going on around us every day we need to really strive to find and eliminate the waste that consumes our valuable time in life.

Finding Waste
When I first read the book, I didn’t connect the dots. Most people understand that creating waste in a production environment results in lost resources and money. However, as my thinking expanded outside of work, I saw areas of waste in everything. Some of the areas I quickly identified are:

The list could carry on for a long time in nearly everything we do. Anyone can find waste in life and there is always room for eliminating some of it. I’ve learned a couple of areas that drastically help with finding and identifying the waste we each experience.

Time Analysis

One of the best ways I know to find waste is to spend a week recording your actions in 15 minute intervals. I learned this technique from Peter Drucker in his timeless masterpiece The Effective Executive in a process he calls the Drucker analysis. You basically capture all your actions on a notepad for an entire week in 15 minute intervals. At the end of the week, you categorize your time spent and look at the overall time spent in each of those categories. Doing this will reveal a lot of time spent on things that don’t really have any lasting impact or importance to you or others around you. Those are the areas of waste!

Ask Others
Another technique is to ask others what they think you spend most of your time on. Generally the impression you give others has some foundation so someone else’s opinion on what you spend your time on is going to be fairly accurate. It may not be what you want them to see or believe, but it likely has merit from normal observation. Again, you can then classify this feedback into groups (if you ask multiple people) and collectively review all the things you spend your time on to see the areas that you consider to be waste.

Review Your Goals and Passions
Look next at your goals and passions in life. What are all the things that are holding you back from those? Everything that holds you back from what is important is potentially waste. For some people, critical thinking comes naturally so it’s often a lot easier to explore the areas that are getting in the way of the important things in life and work. Create a list of 10-20 things that get in the way of your goals and passions and look at which of those you’d consider waste. It’s quite likely that most of them are.

What is YOUR Life Waste Anyway?
The stuff you desire, dream for and long for are the areas you wish to experience more of. Maybe these are your adventures, travels, sports, family, friends, work, hobbies, etc. It’s different for each person of course and the important items in your life are the things that are often the hardest to find time to do. All that stuff that gets in the way is waste. It can seem that daily activities are endless and that most people really don’t want to be doing them. All these are waste:

Most people would agree with those areas that they don’t have any real lasting value. More debatable areas of waste are often in our pastimes:

These are not considered waste for everybody but there is definitely some waste here, it just varies from person to person about how they feel about those activities.

All the other things in life that you HAVE to do may be areas of waste as well. Do they support some other activity that you want to do and spend more time at? Work perhaps? What about your lifestyle and how you manage your time to commute and look after your groceries and bills? All that is wasteful and is worth adding to your list so you can look to eliminate it next!

I was inspired to expand on this topic and build this list because of a post by Andrew Bolis from Personal Hack who wrote that the biggest productivity tip is elimination . My list however, looks specifically at the physical time factor and tasks undertaken in life that are wasteful. Here’s my list:

10 Ways to Eliminate Waste

In order to eliminate waste there are many options, some simple, some drastic. Here are a 10 areas you could easily use to eliminate waste in your life.

    1. Don’t be so Patient!
      Patience is definitely a virtue and it is something that most people who know me would say I have little of. The advantage of that however is that I don’t have the patience to wait around for things. I see it as a huge waste and is an area I’ve learned to eliminate. I avoid line ups at all costs. I don’t wait in lines for simple pleasures like a drink or lunch. I’m not a coffee drinker but I see everyday hundreds of people waiting in line at coffee shops just wasting their time! I grocery shop late in the evening when things are not as busy and lines are shorter. I go to the bank or go shopping when places first open so I can get in and out fast without having to wait in line. If you have less patience with day to day things it is easy to find places to eliminate waste.

 

 

 

 

For example, if you want to spend less time watching TV, you can put the remote in the garage for a month, or put a wall timer on the TV that automatically shuts it off every night at a certain hour. Even unplugging the TV so you have to find the cord and plug it in to use it will help you reduce the time spend in that activity since you can’t as easily do the activity mindlessly. Move your couch so it doesn’t face the TV, put a barricade in place that must be moved to watch or perhaps you might want to simply get rid of one or more televisions. If you have to share one or use it only in one place that is less convenient, so you won’t waste nearly as much time with it.

This tip works for any activity that requires some object or physical device. Pushing the ‘power’ button on the remote is too simple, make it tough.

So, those are the things I find work best to eliminate waste. What are yours? I’d love to hear if these work for you or if you have your own tools to eliminate waste. I hope this gives you a way to look for the things you can stop doing, can say no to and I encourage you to help others learn to eliminate waste as well.

Mike

Written on 9/11/2008 by Mike King. Aside from being a unicyclist and product development manager, Mike blogs at Learn This, a productivity blog for passionately learning career, leadership and life improvement tips. Photo Credit: Grahambones
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