Time Suck #3: Parking

Holy *%&(((^$$$&^ what a pain in the ass it has become to park at DIA. The last time I parked there (which I do practically every week) I drove through all of the west side short term parking, spending about 15-20 minutes trying to find a spot. I finally exited the parking structure to go find a spot in long term which was also full. I then had to go park at the off airport long term parking lot and take a bus in. You might note that this is just a special case of the driving time suck, but it can actually be infinitely more frustrating since you drive around in pointless circles thus aggravating time suck into time suck rage.

I'm not sure what the solution is other than to say, save the planet, save your sanity, and if possible take public transport. I have not taken this advice myself but am seriously considering it.

Time Suck #2 - Meetings

Meetings can be a huge time suck if not run efficiently. It is very easy to drift off topic and not find your way back for large chunks of time. It's best to reserve certain times of the day for meetings so that there are more contiguous blocks of productive time. At Collective Intellect we do dev meetings only in the afternoon, while the majority of business meetings are in the morning. Have a set agenda, make sure everyone knows it beforehand, show up on time, guide the meeting quickly back on track if it starts to wander, schedule for no more than 30 minutes, and probably best advice is to not even have a meeting where an email exchange would suffice.

fyi, an excellent post from the past by 37 Signals on the same subject can be found here.

Time Suck #1 - Rush Hour Traffic

I started writing down a list of all the things in life that take more time than the value they add to your life. If attention is the new currency, then these things are all liabilities on the balance sheet.


#1 - Driving in Rush Hour Traffic
This has got to be the black hole of time sucks. Rush hour traffic should be avoided at almost any cost. Most of the time your schedule can be arranged to avoid such nastiness. When it cannot, carefully evaluate that event for attention ROI taking into account driving time. The horror, the horror...