What is Time Theft? Causes, Impacts & Strategies to Combat It

What is time theft?

Time theft describes hours that leave your day without producing anything. The employment sense of the phrase covers being paid for time not worked; the personal productivity sense, used here, is the more common experience of a full day that yielded nothing you can point at.

Where it goes

• Meetings without a decision. The single largest source in most organisations. An hour of six people is six hours spent.
• Switching. Not the interruption itself but the minutes of degraded work after each one.
• Feeds. Rarely a decision, usually a reflex in the gap when a task turns difficult.
• Rework. Time spent on work done twice because the brief was unclear the first time.
• Deciding what to do. Reading the same list repeatedly without starting anything on it.

Finding yours

Guessing does not work; almost everyone misattributes it. Track actual time for three days, in rough blocks rather than to the minute, then total it by category. The result is usually uncomfortable and specific, and one or two categories normally account for most of the loss.

Recovering it

Attack the largest category rather than everything. Decline or shorten the meetings with no decision attached. Batch the messages. Put the phone somewhere else during hard tasks. Recovering an hour a day from the biggest source beats fifteen minutes from four sources you will not sustain.