I hate wasting my time.
Misdirecting my effort is one of my biggest pet peeves and phobias. (There is nothing worse than realizing you wasted hours tilting at windmills.)
The fear of wasting time makes it really easy to fall into inaction. I often accomplish nothing because I have used all of my time researching, planning, and hand-wringing.
The result is that I end up doing exactly what I fear: wasting time.
Brenda Ueland touched on this paradox in her classic book If You Want to Write:
“When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won’t do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.”