I know, as a DM, I have had countless ideas come to me. Not all of these have been written down, and there are times when an idea/memory is on the tip of my tongue and I wish I had. Granted, not all of the things that I have written down have been used. In fact, most of it hasn't, but that's ok. I'm here to let you know that time you have spent on things is not time you have wasted. This statement comes with a couple caveats, though. First off this theory can be applied to the rest of your life, but that's my opinion not professional advice. Second "spending time" means that there is something you can get out of that time period, after the fact. Finally it should be read: time spend isn't necessarily to be time wasted.
In my opinion, time is only wasted if you don't get something positive out of it. It is up to you to get that something. We're going to keep this tabletop RPG based, so my immediate suggestion is: write it down. Write down everything! Notes, names, descriptions, ideas. What ever it is write it down. If you spend time thinking about things for your games then write down what you were thinking about. Perhaps you weren't "wasting" time when you thought them up, perhaps you were working too, but the thought processes maybe be wasted if the ideas are lost to you. And wouldn't that be a shame.
You may think, after spending three hours looking through bestiaries, that you have wasted three hours. Especially if you didn't find exactly what you were looking for or hoping to find. Here's what you do. Either during those periods, or right after, write down the ideas you had while you were looking. Mark pages that grabbed your interest. If you can't find what you need, and your mind wanders on another topic, start taking notes. Pursue that creative line. If you don't you may loose it, and who knows, you may just come back to what you needed in a round-about way.
The best way to make sure that, even with those practices, you don't waste time, is to save everything and keep it organized. Keep notebooks, label them. Keep folders, label them. When you need ideas or have an idea you need to flesh out, go back to your old stuff. To make that old stuff useful, you have to know where to find it. Organizing is not easy for everybody. Maybe you need paper, maybe you need word documents. Regardless try to keep it organized. And, if you ask me, don't organize it "later". In my experience later becomes later...and later and later. Whenever you have some new ideas or notes or maps or anything, organize it into your archives, or else you may lose those ideas as badly as if you had never written them down.
This goes beyond planning for games. As a player you can plan future characters, or maybe even your own campaign for the future. It also goes for games for new systems you planned but never used, campaign arcs the party avoided, games that ended too soon, and games that never happened. All that work does not have to have been in vain. Save it for later use. Re-skin it or plop it right into another campaign, get inspiration for other things.
When it comes down to it, wasting time through forgotten campaigns, failed games, and the painful enjoyment of players murdering an entire story arc before the reveal, the fear of wasting time can plague gaming groups. They plague no one more than the DMs who work on those things. Don't be discouraged, it is does not have to be time wasted. You can make something of it. If not now, then later. Don't let that time be wasted and don't let such events prevent you from spending time on other projects in the future! And if absolutely nothing else, learn from the experiences; there is always something to be learned.
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