Engaging and maintaining your productivity is a difficult thing to do for most people, especially when the Internet is just a mouse click away, and unfortunately, your bad habits are killing your productivity. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. All it takes to get your productivity back on track is a little awareness and some quick action on your part. Here are six habits that will kill your time management efforts and decrease your productivity.
1. Multitasking: Of all the bad habits, one of the worst and most common is multitasking. Multitasking tricks you into producing incomplete, subpar work daily. When you fall into the habit of multitasking, you aren't doing multiple tasks at the same time, but rather you are giving partial focus to a single task while giving the majority of your attention to switching jobs.
2. Not Having a Work Routine: You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you are in the habit of working whenever you feel like it. It is essential you establish a work routine if you want to get your mind into a productive gear. Without a work routine, you will always go into your work mode cold, which can make getting into the zone much harder.
3. Being a Perfectionist: Another common productivity killer is perfectionism, which can manifest itself in many ways, including being thrown off balance when thing don't go your way or having unrealistically high work standards. When you set unrealistic standards for work, you will tend to work your tasks to death. This can lead to falling behind, which then causes a mountain of tasks to buildup.
4. Having a Giant To-Do List: When you are creating your to-do list, it can be easy to get overzealous and fill it with a dozen or more tasks, that you most likely won't be able to complete. If you can only finish half of your to-do list at the end of the day, it can lead to you feeling overwhelmed. Unfortunately, when you start to feel overwhelmed, you can quickly lose your momentum.
5. Being Indecisive: Indecision can quickly bring a productive work session to a halt. When you don’t know what to decide on, you end up sifting through the information you have and mentally rehearsing the pros and cons until you end up making a decision. Indecisiveness can eat up a lot of energy and willpower in the process and derail your work.
These are just a few of the bad habits that could be responsible for killing your time management efforts. If you find that your productivity is lacking, take a look at your daily habits to see if any of them could be sabotaging your time management efforts and productivity.
