How to be more productive and stop wasting time

Have you ever found yourself wanting to take a 5-minute break to browse the internet a little bit only to realize an hour has gone by without you noticing? This is how it starts, and we’ve all been in this position before.
Be it Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or Quora, taking these “5-minute-breaks” more than often turn into 2 hours of wasted time that you could’ve spent more productively.
But the solution to this problem isn’t what you think, and we will actually approach to eliminate this urge rather than to fight it.

Here are a few ways how to stop wasting time:

Put your phone mobile phone on DND (Do not disturb).
We usually like to receive a notification on our phone as it gives us a slight dose of dopamine, the text from your bank offering you a loan offer or the latest deals from your local supermarket may give you a slight boost for a second, but they are counter-productive.
Once we do check our phone and read that one notification, it opens the door for other distractions to eat up even more of our time, such as seeing that someone liked your picture on Instagram or Facebook and before you’ll know it, you will already be 20 minutes into scrolling your feed without even realizing it.
Social media apps are designed to keep your attention, and they’ve learned how to hook you into browsing for longer periods of time. And you can’t exactly blame them, but by knowing this consciously, you can avoid it.

Don’t use apps, instead choose to do everything on websites.

My phone is filled with applications from Quora, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and many others. These apps may seem like a good idea at first as they are more user-friendly and usually have a simpler design. The downside, however, is that apps can send you notifications while websites cannot. You can probably tell why this would be detrimental to your focus if you have five different apps that are sending you constant notifications throughout the day.
By using a website it may take a little more effort when compared to using an app, and the loading times may be longer, but the extra effort will actually serve to our advantage.
As humans, we don’t like exerting extra effort, so by opening regular websites instead of apps, we will be overcoming the urge to visit them in the first place.

Time blocking is your friend.

Try working in time slots whenever possible. An example would be to set aside the first hour of every day to improve or master a certain area. Then have the next hour be dedicated to working on your long-term goals. At the same time, having the third hour be all about checking and responding to emails. You get the gist of it; time management will go a long way in organizing your day to be more productive.
If you don’t adhere to such time slots, it’s easy to get lost between tasks and bounce around from one to another like a kite in a strong breeze.