YOU know the feeling - the phone is clamped to your ear, while some inane music is being piped through the receiver and you're getting more and more frustrated.

We have all wasted more time than we care to remember being kept on hold, waiting for someone to return that crucial call or just gassing over the water cooler.

Now it seems we've admitted to being a nation of time-wasters, with 80% of us owning up to wasting time, according to new research.

The average person throws away two or three hours a day on unwanted tasks or pointless delays, according to a survey commissioned by the Learning Skills Council.

And it seems a lot of us are a bit annoyed by the amount of time we waste faffing around. The survey of 1,658 Britons also found that nearly a third of people (32%) said they would rather spend the time learning a new skill, with two thirds of those believing a new qualification could boost their career.

Among the biggest time-wasters were waiting for other people, including colleagues (42%), queuing (39.5%), gossiping (36%), being kept on hold on the phone (34%) and chasing up people on jobs (17%).

Chris Banks, chairman of the LSC says: "It's clear that people waste a lot of time, but it's also clear that people are willing to make better use of their time.

"If we all spent two and a half hours a day learning something new, we'd all benefit hugely. Learning a new skill can be a step in the right direction towards a career change, a foot up the career ladder, or even a way to earn more money."

So how we can stop wasting our time at work?

Time management life coach and author of Do It Tomorrow, Mark Forster, says: "The things that seem to cause the most problems are distractions and interruptions, in other words, things which come up during the day which people have no way of forecasting.

"Also, when people have difficult work to do, they tend to procrastinate and the easiest way of procrastinating is to start doing less important things, so that accounts for a lot of wasted time.

"When you get an interruption, don't just immediately leap into action about it, think very carefully about just how urgent it is. 'Does it really need to be done now? Or could I put it off til tomorrow when I can plan for it properly', which could make a lot of difference."

We all get distracted by emails dropping into our inboxes, so Mark recommends turning off your email notification - and check it only at certain times of the day.

"So you might say once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once before you leave," he adds.

"There's a rule about emails, the more you send, the more you're likely to get, so it's always worth bearing that in mind."

When it comes to learning a new skill, first decide whether it really is important.

"After years of coaching people, one of the things I've discovered is that very often people are rushed off their feet and they want to do yet more, whereas we'd be better off doing less and concentrating on what's really important," says Mark.

But if you do want to learn a new skill, it's a good idea to carry your homework around with you.

"I never go anywhere out of my office without taking some fallback piece of work with me," says Mark.

"It might be something I'm doing for myself like learning a language or listening to a self-improvement tape. Even if you're driving a car you can be listening to a tape or CD.

"If you're on the tube, or go to an appointment where someone keeps you hanging around, you can have a bit of work in a briefcase which you can use while you're waiting, so you haven't actually wasted any time."

TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS Follow time management guru Mark Forster's top tips to save time: "I'm against open-ended lists which get longer and longer, but I like checklists, so if you have a fairly difficult bit of work, make a checklist to make life easier."

"Good systems make all the difference between having a smooth-running work life and a work life where you're frustrated all the time. Whenever you find something is going wrong, like you can't find a certain file, sit down and resolve the problem. That 20 minutes will save you time over and over again."

"Always take your lunch hour. It forces you to concentrate in the morning and afternoon. If you work haphazardly through lunch, your work just tends to drift and it means you're not getting proper refreshment."

"Have a stopping time. The fact that you know you're going to stop work at half past five actually concentrates your work. Alot of people get into the state where they faff around all day and then have to work late to catch up, but if you say 'I'm not going to work beyond six', that forces you to do work during the day properly."

"Stop putting off the difficult tasks. Being busy is actually is a defence against having to do stuff that is really going to stress us. You can tell if you've fallen into this activity trap if your work is overwhelming but isn't challenging. In other words, you've got tonnes of trivial stuff, but none of it's really stretching your abilities. Ideally we should have work which uses our skills, but doesn't overwhelm us."

For more top time-management tips, visit Mark Forster's website at www.markforster.net