I am never wasting time, regardless of what I am doing. It is possible for you to attain this level of awareness, but you must read on to do so, it probably won't happen on its own like it did for myself.
I'm sure people have told you you were wasting time while you were doing nothing productive, and you should be able to tell the difference between what was worthwhile and what was not for yourself. I mean, if you're hand writing a letter to your senator about whatever cause you're concerned about, thats something even if it's something that I find as ludicrous as food being prepared by someone without a certification of some kind. You're fighting for a cause you believe in, etc. People may have told you you were wasting time playing a video game or reading a comic book. Before this essay that was something you could have decided for youself if it was worth the time or not. I am here to say no matter what you do, you have never wasted time.
Accomplishing a goal that you set for yourself is one thing, how you deal with that accomplishment is another. You complete a puzzle that took weeks of spare time to complete. Thousands of pieces, hours of time put into it. You now have a master piece before you, what do you do? Insist that no one use the kitchen table ever again? Glue it all together and hang it like a portrait? Carefully transfer it to a place where no one will disturb it? Or do you disassemble it, careful not to break any pieces, and put it back in the box to do again later or to give to a friend to do? Does that last one sound strange to you? To have worked so hard on something for so long, and once it was completed to destroy it. Well, if it sounds like no harm, skip the rest of this essay, you don't need my help. However, if there's a part of you that would want to keep that puzzle whole read on. If the puzzle didn't really connect to you, think of beating a long video game only to delete the save file, painting a portrait that defines who you are as a person only to splash turpintine and clean the canvas, or writing what you feel is the best screen-play hollywood will ever see only to burn it without letting anyone see it.
What I'm trying to get you to do is ask, why? Why would you destroy something you worked so hard to do. The simple answer is, the finished product doesn't matter. If you should ever find yourself at a loss of something that took a great deal of time and money, ask yourself if in the end does it really matter? You can answer this many ways, here are some basic ones:
Athiest: It doesn't matter, 10,000 years from now I'll be dust and no one will have known or cared about anything I did to begin with, so my time and money is inconsquential.
Deist: Did I do it for my glory or for God's? God knows what I did, so it doesn't matter if no one else knows of it.
Pragmatist: It was a waste of time to begin with, a distraction. I know I could do it again, but why should I waste the time/effort/money when I already did it once.
Artist: The act of doing it has improved my skill, I could make something better than it now in every way for I haev learned from my experiances.
That last one is important, because if applies not just to the artist, but to everyone else as well. Your personality is the summation of all your experiances. Genetics or destiny or both my play a role, but your reasoning is based on your experiances in life. Since I believe that to be true, I don't believe I can waste time. I may be any of the four listed above or none, but the last statement rings true. Whatever I do, be it sit at home and stare at the ceiling or go out and party with my friends, I have learned from that experiance. I experianced something, and whatever it was has added to who I am. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative, because it still is me. While some would like to be a being of purely positive experiances, that would an ignorant being. Only through feeling pain can you understand joy, and thus no matter what happens to you, you are a better person for it, for you are now you. If you were to change an action you made in the past, you wouldn't be you, you'd be someone else. Don't waste time wishing you were someone else, cause that will never happen. If you learn to deal with who you are, you will never waste time again.