Others may assign us tasks and make demands on us, but we control our own time.
— Steven McKinley

Everybody wastes some time. And everybody thinks wasting time is a bad thing. But what is wasted time?

In their book Manage Your Time, Manage Your Work, Manage Yourself, Merrill E. Douglass and Donna N. Douglass say, "You waste your time whenever you spend it on something less important when you could be spending it on something more important. Importance is determined by measuring your activities against your objectives."

When we measure the way we actually spend our time with our objectives, it usually becomes clear that we are wasting time. We just don't get done everything we expect, reasonably so, to get done in a week. When that happens week after week, that's frustrating.

So how does one go about trimming wasted time?

I start with this assumption: we are in control of our own time. No one else controls it for us. Others may assign us tasks and make demands on us, but we control our own time. ...