5 Types of People Who Waste Your Time at Work
And how to handle them
Once, during a trip to visit my colleagues at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, I spent nearly eight hours over the course of a week waiting for people to show up to meetings because they were running late, or in some cases, had completely forgotten. Another time, I worked on a strategy proposal all weekend, only to find out my boss had waited to tell me it was no longer needed. Earlier this year, I had to scramble on a project that I waited a month to get the green light on.
I’m sure you have plenty of your own stories, too. You might be the most organized, most efficient person on the planet — but no matter how well you manage your own time, it’s all for nothing if other people misuse it. Because humans are inherently selfish creatures, we often treat others’ time as if it has no value compared to our own. But spending other people’s time poorly isn’t just a microaggression. It’s one of the quickest ways to destroy trust. After all, time is our most valuable commodity, the only currency we cannot earn any more of.
In order to help ourselves and others be truly productive, we need to identify the traits of time wasters. In a talk I gave at QCon London on now we can change the way we think about time, I suggested some ways to better interact with time wasters, or in…
