How to deal with a time sucker

We all know the type — someone who wants to leech off of your success by asking for a quick coffee, or who takes up your precious billable hours with chitchat or gossip. These people suck the time out of your schedule, leaving you feeling resentful and furious.

So how do you eliminate them from your life?

Clinical psychologist Jenny Taitz and Greg McKeown, author, and founder of the Essentialism Academy, offer tips to taking back your time in the Harvard Business Review.

Pinpoint your values before requests arrive in your inbox

If you’re thinking about being kind and giving a stranger your time, you need to consider why. In order to get just as much benefit from a coffee date or a business lunch as the other person, identify what you��re looking to get out of exchanges. As soon as you know exactly what you value in a friendship, relationship, or business exchange, you’ll know what people you want to say yes to engaging with and who would be a waste of time.

Map out a budget — for your life

Your time is money, especially if you work by the hour. A time sucker can easily take up your valuable moments with asinine requests, questions, or favors. That’s why you need to start deciding how to allocate your time to better more productive. You might want to spend more time with your family or existing friends, which leaves little room to make new ones. Or you might not have the bandwidth, as you may be working quite a bit.

If you’re on your lunch hour or have 15 minutes that you aren’t using for anything else, you can allocate some time to speak to someone who needs something from you. But otherwise, don’t bother — if time is money, your time isn’t worth some useless blather from an annoying peer.

If you say yes, then truly be there

You might agree to get coffee with someone you find to be worth your time. If you do, make sure that you’re present and mindful when you’re there. If you’re checked out, then why go at all? Put the phone down, stop thinking about all the other places you could be, and just sit and listen to this person who you may want to call a new friend. If you can’t do that, going out for coffee was a waste of your time, and the last thing you want to do is waste your own time.

Make it more effortless

McKeown and Taitz’s advice for finding the perfect way to both accept and reject coffee dates is to create an email template you can tweak depending on the situation at hand. It should be something that encompasses your personality and values but also seems empathetic and understanding of the other person’s wants and needs.

It should be warm, validating, and most importantly, highly polished. However, you don’t need to use that all the time. If you find that someone’s request is unreasonable or isn’t appropriate to your relationship with them, send their overstepping email right into your spam folder.

Strategize better solutions

The final tip, and ultimate takeaway, is that you must brainstorm better ways to respond to time suckers. You should think of a way that doesn’t interfere with your emotional state or schedule, as it could drain you and prevent you from doing the things you really want to do.

You should aim to be kind, not self-centered, and to make sure you set boundaries in a firm but understanding way. Don’t let people walk all over you or you’ll wake up one day and find yourself miserable.