We all waste a lot of time.

Yes, I know that most of us complain that we have no time to spare from our busy schedules. If it's not kids and all their acitivities, then it's work or trying to keep a relationship going or whatever, but the truth is that we all spend lots of our time during the day doing nothing much productive. We all kill a lot of time. Hey, how much time do you spend every day on personal email while you're at the office? Or tidying up your personal space? Or ordering a coffee? Or chatting in the office with co-workers? Or playing a card game on the computer? Or shopping for something on e-Bay? In this current era of instant communication, lots of us do waste lots of time at work. Come on now, admit it. Maybe you are the only person in your office who doesn't, who spends all her time trying to make the company more money or trying to satisfy disgruntled customers of even drumming up new business. If so, you deserve a gold star from management. The truth is that any given job, in this information/e-information environment, demands less and less of our real human time. Suppose you type up and e-send specs for a given job, or you deal with important clients that you refer higher up the chain, or you just send out notices to delinquent borrowers/debtors saying that they need to pay up soon or else. You may do all that in the course of a few hours -- without generating any paper that needs to be copied, etc. --so that there are parts of your day when you've done what was asked of you and no one is watching what you're doing, when you're un-supervised, no? It's the nature of our modern/current job environment. What used to take hours on the phone or by letter, waiting for a return letter, can now be settled, or at least started, in minutes via email. Are you doing less work? No. Are you doing it more efficiently? Yes. Are you entitled to the saved time to spend on yourself? Maybe. What we shouldn't do with any extra time is fritter it away. I can't tell you how many times, when I was working in the publishing biz, I encountered secretaries playing Solitaire on their computers, matching up cards online to no purpose. (Card games are kind of a waste of time anyway -- for the most part -- but that's the subject of another post.) If our job allows us some free minutes or even hours, shouldn't we put them to good use? Schedule the kids' activities? Arrange a dinner with a neglected spouse? Write that novel? Look for that better job? Or try to make our company more productive? How many of us use our time that way? This doesn't apply, by the way, to those of us who labor at the low end of the work spectrum. If you are a roofer or an electrician or a waiter or a nanny or a retail clerk or whatever, your work day is pretty much circumscribed: check in at a certain time, check out at a certain time. You may or may not have gone to college, dreaming of something better, but here you are locked into a job that has time limits built in. Not much extra/personal time. For lots of us, though, that's not the case. Most of us think we're over-burdened when we really aren't. Yes, we work and tend to families and try to keep up a social life and think ourselves stretched to the limit when we're actually living a pretty good life. A hundred years ago, we really were stretched, the man working for almost nothing and the woman staying home, changing diapers and doing laundry, hoping her husband didn't drink away all his wages. And where did we live? In pauper conditions, if we were un-lucky, which lots of us were. In a modest house with a one-car garage if we were lucky. Nowadays, most men and women in America make good wages and often live in tidy, if not luxurious, houses. We have indoor plumbing and internet connections and don't worry much about crime. We have cable TV, maybe even HBO and Showtime. Life is good, no? But still we think we're over-burdened. Oh please. Think of your grandmother or your great grandmother doing laundry by hand and then hanging it out on a line to dry -- no washers and dryers -- and cooking supper with no microwave ovens. Try to imagine stoking up a fire to cook the family dinner. No take-out, no going to a resturant, no nothing but what you could conjure from what meager meats and veggies you could afford on one man's salary. And nothing on TV. Zilch. It hadn't been invented. There wasn't much wasted time in those days because there wasn't much time to waste. Like animals in the wild, our ancestors spent a lot of their time scrounging for food to feed their families. With few appliances to help, they had to make do. Everything was done by hand. Fast-forward to now. Yes, we're busy, but we have so much help. Microwaves and take-out and even the once-a-week trip to a restaurant. We have much more time on our hands than our ancestors had. Do we use it wisely? Do the CEOs and CFOs use their time wisely? How much time do they devote to scheduling golf dates or nights out with their friends? We all, in these times, have time on our hands. Time to kill. A guy who worked on a lucrative government contract once told me that he spent about half his work day -- the nine-to-five -- on his project and the rest on, well, whatever. Booking a table at a popular restuarant, looking up old friends online, posting pictures of his latest fishing trip, etc. And this was someone who was well-paid, by the government, to devote all his time to us, the taxpayers. What do the rest of us do? You know what. Be honest. How much of your day is devoted to your job? I mean, break it down. How many of the eight hours or so are spent on company business? Hour by hour. Some, to be sure, but not nearly as much as you claim (and complain about), right? It's nothing to be ashamed of but something to admit to. We have it better than our ancestors, right? We get paid for doing only some of the work we're contracted to do, but we do it well and are rightfully compensated. Still, we don't spend all our day doing it, do we? We all waste lots of time, and what we really need to do is figure out how to turn that down time to something productive, if not for our company then at least for us. We're all mortal -- doomed to die someday -- and we can't afford to waste even a minute. Okay, maybe a minute every now and then -- even an hour or two -- but not much, right? We need to make all our time on this earth count for something, even if it's just having a good time. Own up.