What is the ‘thief’ of your time?

Chugbo is 14years and a senior secondary student in one of the private schools in Lagos. Week days after school, he spends an average of between four to five hours watching ‘interesting’ programmes on television. When he is not sitting before the television set, he is sweating it out with his computer game. Food is either done after this time or he munches on whatever snack he can find. With these number of hours wasted, Chugbo never gets his academic assignment done properly, he never gets to pack up his books for school until it is next day morning. So, he is always having a fall out with his mother.

Carol has two daughters in primary school. After dropping them off at school every day, she engages herself in watching home movies. She never fails on her target of watching at least two 3-hour-movies daily. With this addiction, Carol rushes to prepare lunch for the family. Any other spare time is for endless chats with friends, to the detriment of giving quality time to her family.

Debola is out of college, but yet to secure a job. Look nowhere else to catch him than at the Newspaper vendor’s stand. Debola is ever punctual there; he oversees the affairs of the free readers association and spends nothing short of  four hours there daily, rather than go searching for a job. “Where are the jobs?”, he teases anyone who bothers to mention to him. But can he get a job at the newspaper stand in arguments daily? That is best known to him.

The scenario above is not strange because we see it happening almost everywhere. We have heard at different times that ‘time is money’, yet some people play away precious time doing nothing for real.  While some people waste time watching television or playing video games, others stay tied to gists. It becomes dangerous when they don’t realize it on time that they are wasting time that could  otherwise have been used to achieve something valuable.

In many offices today, some workers have gotten themselves addicted with facebooking and chatting with friends instead of work. Others engage in vain discussions and their attitudes cause the overall work output to suffer. This negative attitude is what I call a ‘thief’ of time, and it can be dealt with by developing a guide on how to achieve set goals, e.g like  having a ‘to-do-list’ and being sincere about it. I don’t believe that there is a one- pattern- fit –all strategy that could solve the problem, but each person should be able to understand how they could work themselves out of it. The first step  that I would suggest is self-discipline.