Some years ago, I lived in New Jersey and rode the bus into Manhattan to work. One day, during an idle bus moment—and trust me, they were all idle—I did the math on my commute: 90 minutes door-to-door, 3 hours a day round-trip. So it amounted to 15 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, for 8 years. That's 5,760 hours. Divided by the 40-hour workweek, it comes to 144 weeks. That's nearly 3 years' worth of "extra" work time I spent on a New Jersey Transit bus with no toilet.

I discovered a lot about time that day.

On one hand, it was a justifiable expenditure; I was earning a living. Millions of men do the same thing each day. And yet it was also an epic, flagrant waste. Killing time is a subtle form of suicide—the slaughter of minutes and hours by a straight razor slowly pulled across your goals and dreams.

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"A lot of men go through life totally unconscious of time," says Robert Pagliarini, a financial and time-efficiency columnist for CBS MoneyWatch.com and the author of The Other 8 Hours. "They don't, or won't, see how limited time really is, so they never focus on it. Years go by and they haven't achieved what they wanted to, and they're like, 'Whoa, what happened?' "

Men's Health decided to find out exactly "what happened." We pored over the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics annual American Time Use Survey. We spoke to experts on the psychology of time management. Then we developed our own online Men's Health Time Use Survey to pinpoint how men like you throw around your minutes. More than 1,800 of you responded. What did we find? An alarming disrespect for the 24 hours we burn through each day.

The goal is to come as close as possible to what Robert E. Goodin, D.Phil, and his colleagues call "temporal autonomy." In their book Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, the researchers argue that time is better than money as an indicator of success. If you control your time, they say, you control your entire life. And to extend the time-money comparison, a man's time burn is the equivalent of a company's cash burn: You have only so much before the fire winks out. "If you can identify the gaps in your time, you can invest your time better so you achieve higher returns on it," Pagliarini says.

Read on—and remake your harried, wasted day into a splendid expanse of hours that you control. Isn't that the ultimate luxury?

PART ONE: MORNING & BEYOND

Wake the Hell Up, Already
The Beatles knew how to wake up, fall out of bed, drag combs across their heads, and make the bus in seconds flat. What the hell's taking you so long? Nearly three out of four men in our survey need more than 30 minutes to go from bed to front door in the morning, and 43 percent need longer than 45 minutes. We know women who've prepped for their own weddings faster than that. One of the top reasons (29 percent) men gave for their glacial pace? Motivating themselves to toss the covers and hop to it. Even more (30 percent) said showering took the most time. Showering?

Live better
Go to bed earlier. Lingering under the covers past your wakeup call has little to do with motivation and a lot to do with inadequate sleep. More than a quarter of the men in our poll start their bedtime routines at 11 p.m. or later, and 62 percent manage on less than 7 hours of sleep a night. That's a dangerous disrespect for your time and health. "Thinking you can function on abbreviated sleep is thinking you're a god. You're not; you're a human being who needs to sleep," says Neil Fiore, Ph.D., a psychologist and executive coach and the author of The Now Habit at Work. "Lack of sleep elevates your cortisol levels, which can put a spare tire around your waist. And even worse, it robs your brain of the time it needs to work a full shift." You're missing out on restorative deep sleep and the clearing of sleep-promoting adenosine that builds up during the day. If those two are in working order, you feel like a million bucks first thing in the a.m., instead of a crumpled-up fiver.

As for the shower, come on now. Use a combo shampoo-shave-soap-body wash (Nivea's has avocado and sunflower extracts to moisturize skin). Install a shower clock radio like the Sony ICF-CD73W ($70), and time yourself; with a little self-competition and less daydreaming, you can be in, out, shaved, and ready in under 5 minutes.

Lose the Wait
Two-thirds of the men in our survey spend as much as 30 minutes a day waiting for something—the dentist, customer service, Godot. The other third wait more than 30 minutes. Again, do the math: 31/2 hours a week translates to more than one 24-hour day lost every 2 months, or essentially a week a year...waiting. What's worse, 41 percent of those men spend that time doing nothing but...waiting. Another 26 percent, the smarter bunch, at least catch up on calls, e-mails, and texts.

Live better
Legitimize waiting as part of your day. It will happen, so expect it, plan for it, and engage it, says Pagliarini. "Don't be in that situation and then think, Okay, what can I be doing? Always carry something you can use. Wherever I go, I carry a 'dead time' folder in my bag. It's full of work documents, magazines, articles printed from the Web, whatever I want to get to. Whenever I have to wait, bam, I open the folder."

Even sitting at a traffic light is an opportunity, says Pagliarini. "I pair off little moments like that with something useful. At lights, I now have a habit of taking a series of deep breaths because my typical day makes me a ball of stress. I use the red lights to hit reset, and then move on. It helps me a lot."

Commute Harder and Smarter
Commuting is a fact of life. Some 124 million people commute to work in the United States, and men spend an average of 27 minutes one-way, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The typical advice is to take mass transit. But commuting isn't what it used to be. Sprawl has displaced the traditional suburb-to-city commute with suburb-to-suburb (41 million people) and rural-to-rural (20 million) travel; public transportation isn't always an option.

Also, more workers are locked into "extreme" commuting (45-plus minutes one-way) because of crucial employment opportunities or housing affordability. "This helps explain why driving alone to work has trended upward since 1980 from 64 percent to 76 percent," says Marcus Bowman, founder of 3G Mobility, a firm in D.C. that studies transportation trends and policy. "The fact is, people don't always have a choice." A lack of options hits men in particular, who are 36 percent more likely than women to have an extreme commute.

Live better
Driving alone to work limits your activity, of course. You can do some hands-free phone calls. Make plans. Listen to tunes, talk radio, audio books. Or you can be a moron by texting while driving, like the 68 percent of men in our survey who admitted to doing that. (Picture Sonny Corleone smacking you in the head right now, saying, "You're really stupid.") Mass transit, if it's available, unlocks all that time: Laptops, e-mails, undistracted phone calls, nonlethal texting, and sleep all become options.

Bowman also suggests taking on passengers or carpooling, which can save you money. You can charge riders for fuel, tolls, and parking. Avego, a company that improves passenger transportation efficiency, has an iPhone GPS app that connects drivers with potential carpoolers looking for a lift along the same route in real time. Avego calculates a fair price for riders and then pays you. (The company skims its cut, of course. Download the app to see who's using it in your area.) "Taking on passengers offers possibilities," says Bowman. "Not only can you use the faster HOV lanes, but you can also have real conversation, connection, and even networking." Or, if you're the passenger, the laptop and e-mail become options again.

If you're determined to remain alone in your car, however, you'll need to sacrifice a huge chunk of time to that decision, and live with it. At least consider asking your boss if you can adjust your schedule by starting earlier or later in the day to avoid peak commute times, Bowman says. If something that simple could shorten your commute by even 10 percent, it would be worth the time, right?

PART TWO: THE WORKDAY

Rev Up Faster
A third of the men we surveyed take between 5 and 15 minutes to begin working after they arrive. Another 17 percent take longer than that. Why? They check news online or chat with coworkers—the two most common reasons. Another 33 percent simply don't feel like starting right away.

There could be a hundred reasons a man procrastinates. Some fear starting a project because the results might not be good enough. The fact is, even high achievers procrastinate, says Fiore. But work is not a workout that requires a 10-minute warmup. Start fast and you hit your rhythm quicker and accomplish more. Yet there we are, our life minutes spinning off like wasted squares of toilet paper on an ever-shrinking roll.

Live better
Pair a physical act with the psychological start to work, says Pagliarini. Make turning on your computer, or an equivalent routine, your starting gun: I will now work. If the temptation of the Internet is the core problem, then leave your computer off for the first half hour. "Focus on noncomputer tasks to plunge you into the workday. Schedule an important meeting or phone call at 9 a.m.," he says. "As soon as you walk in the door, you have no choice but to launch into work mode."

For those procrastinating perfectionists, Fiore suggests a change of perception. "We always say we have to get things done. Well, where's 'done'? The future. It could be 4 hours away or 400 hours away. That causes anxiety. Don't 'get things done.' Start them. Say, 'Start here,' and go for 15 minutes without stopping. Because once you're going for 15 minutes, you'll build momentum. It's a procrastination inoculation."

Stop Lying About Your Workload
The authors of Discretionary Time write about the concept of "time poverty": "We all know about the working poor, people whose wages are so low that they cannot escape poverty even by working full-time. There are also people who manage to avoid being 'money poor' only by making themselves 'time poor—that is, working terribly long hours."

It's true. We spend huge chunks of our weekdays and sometimes weekends on the job, selling our time to our bosses for unsatisfying prices. But a funny thing happens between bitching about our 60- to 80-hour workweeks and checking up on some actual numbers. The fact is, some of us don't work as hard as we say we do.

Take a look: In our survey, 53 percent of men admitted to "actually working" 6 hours or less during the average day. Seventeen percent work only 4 to 5 hours. Guys who work 10-plus hours a day? A mere 4 percent. We weren't the only ones to discover the work gap. According to a Web survey of more than 10,000 people by America Online and Salary.com, the average worker admits to wasting more than 2 hours a day. The biggest time suckers: personal Internet use (45 percent) and yakking with coworkers (23 percent). When asked why they wasted so much time, the number one excuse was, "I don't have enough work to do."

Live better
It would be easy to advise you to work harder for longer hours, but why would you? "If you offered people the option of working 6 hours and being paid for a full day, they would take that in a second," says Pagliarini. "That's what's happening unintentionally, because employers are focused more on time spent working than on results."

So take the initiative to exceed your current productivity numbers, maybe even double them, in the same amount of work time. How? "Lose your ego-oriented thoughts and focus on task-oriented thoughts," says Fiore. "Ego-related thoughts focus on self-criticism and take you out of the present and into the past and future—I can't get ahead here, what's wrong with me, what's going to happen if I don't succeed, what should I have done in the past?" However, task-oriented thinking puts you in the middle of the action: What does the job require? What do I know now? What can I do now?

That kind of focus requires a new commitment to the work, and that will delight most bosses. So try this approach for a while. And when you don't have enough work to do, ask for more. See how your boss reacts and if the out-of-whack compensation philosophy changes.

Schedule a vacation—now
Time off from work is not a luxury. You're entitled to whatever you and your employer agree to. Yet Expedia.com reports that 31 percent of Americans usually don't use all their allotted vacation days each year. In fact, a global survey by Mercer, an international human-resources consulting and research firm, shows that U.S. workers typically take 25 days off a year, including holidays. But workers in other countries do a lot better. Workers in Brazil, Lithuania, Finland, France, and Russia all have 40 or more available days. In Japan, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Greece, and the United Kingdom, they have at least 36. All well and good, you say, but how do these slackers accomplish anything? Keep reading.

Live better
The results of a 4-year study published in the October 2009 Harvard Business Review go against most employers' philosophies. During the study, workers at the exclusive Boston Consulting Group—not exactly a collection of underachievers—were forced to take a block of additional time off on top of the vacation time they would normally take. Checking e-mail and voice mail was prohibited. The result: Not only were the participants able to take their time off, but their work performance also improved and they were more satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance. How did it happen? Being in the office for less time forced them to do a better job of communicating with team members, planning ahead, and streamlining duties. Teams shared more personal information and forged closer relationships. In short, taking more vacation time made them superemployees. Take that, boss!

PART THREE: EVENINGS & WEEKENDS

Buy a trip, not a toy
Hey, nice plasma TV. Cool shoes. That robot dog's better than the real thing. And your car, well, it's so slick you could just about drive through a mountain without the tunnel. But here's the problem: You won't ever drive that car through a mountain. You'll just drive it, probably solo, on your commute. This is a troubling waste of time. Because, my well-heeled, expensively shod friend, where you go is far more important than what takes you there.

Live better
A 2009 San Francisco State University study showed that people who spent money on experiences were happier with their purchases than those who bought material things. They found greater vitality both during the experience and in reflecting about it afterward. In essence, some people pay for long-term memories, others for temporary material reward. Temporary? Yes. Previous research has demonstrated that the initial pleasure from a new possession fades within 6 to 8 weeks. So invest your money in an unforgettable time, not a toy.

Redefine "Quality Time"
This may be the most crucial part of taking back your time. How you spend your leisure hours will define how successful you ultimately will be, says Pagliarini. Why? It all dials into the limitations of a 24-hour day. Obviously, we need to dedicate a third of our day to sleep. Another third or more goes to our paying gigs. What's left is our "real life" of family, relationships, and play—in theory.

Here's how we really spend quality time: Fifty-one percent of us watch TV or use the Internet. The rest of us take care of things like housework and exercise. Four percent work on a hobby, 8 percent spend time with family, 6 percent read, and less than 1 percent volunteer or do nonprofit work.

"If the folks who use their free time for TV and Twitter are happy with their waist size, bank account, sex life, family life, and life in general, I say, go for it, watch your TV," says Pagliarini. "But how many are that happy?"

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Pagliarini's book The Other 8 Hours, studies this third-of-a-day, a period so full of possibility that "this is the time when you'll make the greatest gains in life," he says. Want to lose weight? Start a business? Earn a degree? Learn a language? You succeed or fail at these things not as you sleep or at your job, but during your spare time.

"Examine the space between where you are and where you want to be," he says—"I want to weigh X but I weigh Y, I want to earn X but I earn Y—and you'll feel the pain of those gaps. And really feel it. Then strategize ways to close those gaps during your other 8 hours."

The time investment does not have to be huge, but it does have to be consistent and focused. "I'm not saying, 'Be a robot and use every minute of every day,'" Pagliarini says. "If we just fill up part of that free time with activities that bring us closer to our goals, we start to bridge those gaps. For example, if you write just one page a day, at the end of the year you'll have a book. I've interviewed a lot of people who changed just a sliver of their day, and the payoffs have been huge."

Now, go back to those leisure-time survey statistics above: Very few people are doing this.

Time for you to start.