Songfacts®:

• For their 2022 album, Gardens, The Heavy Hours reworked a batch of songs they wrote and recorded back before they had a record deal. "Wasting All Our Time" captures the emotions of a group of young guys that are still paying their dues and trying to achieve their dream. At the time, a lot of their friends resented the effort they were putting into the band instead of their friend group.
  
  Lead singer Michael Marcagi told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022, "In a way, we wrote this song in an angsty, mid-20s, young 20-year-old kind of way, like, 'F-you to getting a normal boring job and just settling down - we want to go chase our dreams.' And we might be wasting all our time, but this is what we want to do."
• AJ Yorio, the band's guitarist, originally envisioned this track in a slower tempo, but his bandmates cranked it up. Marcagi recalled, "We were like, if we're gonna sing a song about wasting our time, we want it to be the most in-your-face, rock-and-roll banger that we possibly can."
• They took sonic inspiration from the Southern-rock band J. Roddy Walston and the Business and their piano-pounding frontman. Marcagi explained, "If there's ever a song where we can be messy and not exactly play the right notes, and it doesn't matter if I just sit up there and bang the keys on a piano and scream in the microphone, this is it."