- There are too many of us in the same place.
- We’re all trying to get someplace else.
- We get in each other’s way doing it.
No matter which line you pick at the grocery store, the line
you pick will move the slowest, right? You’ll always wind up
behind the person with twenty-six items in the “12 Items or Less”
line. That person will wait until those twenty-six items have been
scanned and totaled before beginning to think about paying. And
then the miscreant will drag out a change purse and pay in pen-
nies, 4,284 of them.
What can you do? You can rant and bellow. You can make snide
comments under your breath. You can dump your groceries on the
ground and walk away. You can switch to another line—and wind
up behind someone who wants to get a refund on a quart of ice
cream purchased at another store, in another decade.
Or you can take what seems to be a lemon and make lemonade.
hOW TO U Se The WaiT Time: Three STep S ThaT WiLL maKe
YOU mOre prODUCTiVe anD LeSS S Tre SS eD
Step 1. accept the Wait as Inevitable
Waiting is destructive for two reasons. First, if you haven’t
allowed sufficient time for waiting, the wait will destroy your sched-
ule and cause you to be late for other appointments and to fail to
complete necessary tasks. You can defuse this time bomb, lowering
the stakes in the waiting game, by refusing to overpack the sched-
ule. That way, the wait can’t hurt you as much.
But waiting can be even more destructive because of what it does
to your insides. Oh, how we seethe as we idle in traffic or jiggle and
fidget in the waiting room. That seething can trigger a corrosive
stress reaction, harming us physically as well as emotionally.
T U R N D O W N T I M E I N T O P R O D U C T I V E T I M E