Wasting Time?

I have been thinking about this for a while: Maybe a new entrepreneurial idea. I have noticed that in quite a few organizations, bschools,workplaces, etc, we tend to waste a significant portion of our time on insignificant things. These things ultimately end up becoming time killers. This eats away a major portion of our time, which ideally we should dedicate on critical activities.

These time killers are trivial things: i) Formatting an excel sheet or a powerpoint/word document. Believe me, I have seen people spending hours deciding what color should be used, what font, and all that. Of course these things do matter to an extent, but people actually spend more time on formatting than on idea creation/strategy formulation.

ii) Wasting time on online chats/facebooks, etc. Of course social media is a great tool to market yourself and network with people. But more often than not, you just end up wasting majority of your time doing useless stuff which doesn’t benefit you in any way. Come on, go and meet people, chatting can only take you that far.

P.S.- Maybe some software package or similar can be developed which can automatically take care of the formatting, designing,etc and leave the manager to do more important work. Then of course, there are some managers who spend almost all of their time in meetings. I really wonder how constructive these meetings actually are.