You always have work, all the time, you work long hours, even weekends. You don’t go out much, not in touch with friends or family and when you make it to see someone or attend an event, it feels like a huge personal sacrifice. Even grooming is a chore – you rather have an hour of uninterrupted sleep. You are the world’s busiest person, and other people don’t seem to understand what it is you do all-the-time! You even catch yourself wondering aloud, for the umpteenth time, what you got yourself into. BUT, you love what you do, it’s exhilarating and excruciating at times. If this describes you, then you more than likely work with the creative world, where there is never enough time.

Or maybe you aggravate the situation just a little. Perhaps you have some time bandits.

• The Phone – the instant messaging apps, the calls– work, friends, family. The phone keeps pinging every few moments. You keep checking and responding to seemingly harmless queries, stealing a few more precious minutes of your day.
• The e-mails – every issue is urgent, true! Every single issue needs to be addressed but can it wait till you get some work out of the way? No you probably stop, address that issue and lose your train of thought while for a document whose deadline is in 30 minutes.
• The calls, the phone has rung again, client x wants you to undo hours of work with one phone-call, just like that, the chances of this project being a success is dimming. Will I even be able to finish this piece before within 20 minutes?
• The meetings, numerous meetings to discuss miniscule details that could have been resolved by mail or skype or some other cool app that has teleconference capabilities. Nope, just lose a few more hours of your day.
• Eating is also a waste of time. No just kidding. Please eat, and keep hydrated – water is your best friend.
• The slow internet, crawling, slowing your work process down.
• They’re only the most important people in our lives: the boss, colleagues, family and friends. “Got a minute?” they ask. And just like that, you’re robbed again of something valuable that you can never retrieve.

If you’re like most people, you lose three to five hours every day due to interruptions. Worse yet, you don’t realize your time has been stolen. So how do you stop the time hemorrhaging like that? You can find out from our piece on ‘Arresting The Time Bandits’

Article credit is to ‘3 Steps to Recovering Stolen Time: Confront Your Time Bandits, http://www.entrepreneur.com/