Time Management Tips for Making Use of Spare Minutes

I’m sure you know what I mean by “spare minutes” – those are those small bits of minutes where you’re waiting for a reply on an email or waiting for the copier to finish making the kazillion copies.  They are the minutes where it isn’t really worth it to start a new task because you’re just going to have to get up and take care of the one you started in a couple of minutes.

But you can make them more productive.

Dumb Little Man (who really isn’t very dumb at all!) has some great ideas and you can read about them in his post Eight Ways to Make Use of Your Spare Minutes Online.

I loved this:

…how about finding some way toharvest those spare minutes and use them for something a bit more useful than looking at amusingly-captioned pictures of cats?

Why?  Because I think we are all guilty of that (literally or figuratively – in my case, literally) at some point.  And when we start looking at those damned cats a couple minutes can turn into much more than that.  I’ve found myself looking at LOL cats for 15 or 20 minutes before I realize that the copies are done!

Here’s a few more suggestions for using spare minutes:

1. Clean your desk.  It’s always so much easier to focus when your desk is clean.
2. Make an order list.
3. Plan a blog post.
4. Water the plants (they need attention, too!).
5. Send someone a thank you e-mail (there must be someone you need to thank for something!)
6. Update your calendar.
7. Write your grocery list.

What do you do in your spare minutes?

Tagged as: spare minutes, time management tips