How do you stop yourself from wasting time? It has become an addiction which leads to frustration at the end of the day.

How do you stop yourself from wasting time? It has become an addiction which leads to frustration at the end of the day. –@jaideepkhare

I’m the biggest time waster of all. I was having breakfast a few weeks ago with Naval Ravikant, the founder of Angelist. He refers to the ritual of doing all the Internet checks as “the loop.” The loop of checking Twitter, Facebook, emails, blogs, analytics, news, etc.

After that breakfast I timed how long my particular loop took. I thought it would be about three or four minutes. It was eighteen minutes. And that didn’t count me responding to anything. And I do that loop about ten times a day. That’s 180 minutes. Three hours! Holy…!

So here’s what I’m doing. You can’t stop cold turkey. That is like a complete alcoholic stopping suddenly and at once. You wake up in the middle of the night with the shakes right away, and if you don’t end up in a hospital where they are pumping new blood into you then you can die.

One minute a day I’m taking out one of the things I do to waste time. There’s the loop, there’s playing extra games of chess online. Etc. One minute a day. By the end of the year I should be down from about 250 minutes a day to about 20 minutes a day. That will be good.

And my three year goal, as I mentioned in “My Minimalism Manifesto” http://bit.ly/rMTIyn is to get down to 30 minutes of Internet time a day. Maybe I will find other things to fill that time but I hope they are fun, productive things.

That’s it. One minute a day gets rid of. Don’t kill yourself trying to do it all at once. You’ll get the shakes and die. Just one minute a day.