Time-wasting activities can be a serious cause of chaos in your life since they interrupt and distract you. You encounter so many distractions in your daily life that they collectively eat up a lot of your time.

Time-wasting activities are what we all dislike, but often do unconsciously. Despite knowing that these activities waste your time, you still do them each day.

This article aims to bring your attention to the five most significant time wasters. If you are aware of your bad habits, you can use several apps and tools to eliminate them from your life.

1. Checking Email

Checking Emails in Frustation

Email has become a vital tool for business communication, and it is so integral to our everyday lives. Even though email isn't bad in itself, checking your inbox constantly is a waste of your time.

An average person checks his email 15 times a day, according to a 2012 study. This number would be much higher now. These frequent interruptions break your rhythm and slow down what you are doing.

You may not want to start the day by responding to all email messages. In addition to essential office emails, you'll be dealing with other people's requests and problems. When you do this, you are more concerned with the agendas of others than your own.

You can make your email communication more efficient by using Gmail apps like Inbox When Ready for Gmail and Simplify Gmail. Furthermore, if you only respond to important emails, you can save valuable time. Set certain hours during the day to check for emails in order to break these bad habits.

2. Social Media

Person Using Social Media at Work

Browsing through social media websites is not a valuable use of your time and decreases your daily productivity. These days, social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter eat up most of our time.

When you are sitting at your computer anticipating finishing your work, you suddenly feel the desire to check Facebook right then. Despite not intending to, you end up scrolling through your social media feed for longer than you intended. Despite our best efforts, this happens to everyone.

According to McLean Hospital, overuse of social media causes sleep problems, which lead to depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance.

To avoid this interruption, you should set your phone to airplane mode and place it far from your workstation. You can also block social media sites using site blocker extensions before starting your work. The few minutes you spend on social media every hour will add up to a significant impact.

Related: Tips to Help You Waste Less Time on Social Media

3. Multitasking

Girl Doing Multi Tasking

Multitasking is one of the many destructions of the workplace. It may seem like a good way to do multiple tasks at once, and people often think multitasking is a great skill, but research suggests otherwise.

Several recent studies suggest that multitasking can lower productivity by as much as 40%. Furthermore, there are in-depth studies on how it affects the brain.

If you're constantly interrupted while doing any task, you will probably take longer to complete it. Since the human brain can only focus on one thing at a time, you can decrease efficiency and performance by doing multiple things at the same time. So despite what people believe, multitasking is a time-waster you should avoid.

By scheduling your day beforehand with software and apps, you can avoid multitasking by allocating dedicated time for each task. You can also use the time tracking apps to compare your performance while doing multitasking and dealing with one thing at a time.

Avoid multitasking by only concentrating on one thing, and you will be able to finish tasks much faster.

4. Procrastination

Procrastination

Anything that delays or postpones what you are going to do can be considered procrastination. No matter what profession you belong to, whether you're a student, an employee, or a businessman, procrastination affects everyone.

Even before you start working, your brain goes into avoidance mode due to procrastination. It slows down the work little by little. That’s why, despite spending so many hours at the desk, you still can’t finish the work you planned to do.

Despite the fact that you can’t avoid it instantly, you can regularly train your mind to get rid of procrastination. There are tools to track websites, which puts you in the procrastination zone. This way, you can avoid visiting them during work hours to stay focused.

Another way to stop procrastination is to break down the steps. Divide your tasks into smaller steps whenever possible. In this way, you will increase your procrastination expectancy, as smaller tasks seem more manageable than larger projects.

5. Indecision

Man Seeing Two Different Paths Indecision

Are you one of those people who consider every single decision and think about it for hours on end? Changing your approach would be the best solution in that case.

By making timely decisions and planning ahead of time, you can avoid going into a loop and deciding what to do. Making effective decisions can help you improve your productivity.

Using to-do lists, making daily schedules, setting reminders, and using apps to plan your schedule helps you make good decisions. Use services such as Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To-Do, Google Tasks, and WorkFlowy to manage your schedule effectively.

Related: Time Trackers to Stop Wasting Time and Improve Time Management

Get Rid of Distractions to Be More Productive

Time management relies on routines and habits. Due to these distractions, we are overburdened daily, which reduces our attention span. By removing these five time-wasters from your daily routine, you will be more productive. So, you can improve your productivity by altering your habits.

Changing a habit normally takes 30 days, so do not expect immediate results. To see improvements, you must be committed for a few weeks or a month. Organize yourself to the fullest extent possible by taking advantage of time management and scheduling apps. You can also improve your time management by following time management strategies.

Monitor the websites that consume the most of your time daily, block them permanently, and notice the difference in your productivity.