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“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940 – present) is an American author, the writer of the New York Times bestsellers “Life’s Little Instruction Book” and “Life’s Little Instruction Book: Vol.2.”
This quote answers the question of why some people are more productive than others. Time management has become very challenging with today’s massive amount of distractions. Impulsive web browsing is one of the many bad habits that kill productivity. A study by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange found out that an average American user, from 18 to 34, spends more than three hours on social media, and an average of 42.1 minutes per day is spent on Facebook, according to a poll by Cowen and Company.
Procrastination is also a problem. Chronic procrastination gets the better of more or less twenty percent of the population, according to the study by the University of Ottawa. They also found out that procrastinators actively search for distractions and the most common way is through the internet. Although they can change their behaviour, fighting this habit is almost likened to overcoming depression: it needs a lot of effort and cognitive behavioural therapy.
The result of increasing one’s productivity is so much worth the effort though. One of the world’s youngest billionaire and most influential people, Mark Zuckerberg, once said, “The question I ask myself almost everyday is ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’… Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I”m spending my time.”