8 Common Productivity Mistakes And How To Overcome Them

While you tend to put in your 100%, you still can’t achieve what you aim for! That’s because you are making these productivity mistakes that can affect your work and life goals.

As the world is becoming more competitive with each passing day, success is becoming synonymous with productivity.

For most of us, work is defined yet we often struggle to reach our goals, falling prey to distractions and procrastinating more than needed.

Even though we are aware that we could do better to manage time more effectively, it gets difficult to identify the common mistakes that we make in our daily lives while aiming to reach our goals.

In this article, we shall help you to identify those common mistakes and provide you with tips that you can use to overcome them.

Productivity mistakes and tips to overcome them:

Mistake 1 – Not Emptying Your Brain Before Getting Started With Work.

A human mind is a storehouse of thoughts and it’s necessary to empty our brains before we get to work.

According to the productivity expert, David Allen, carrying too much information in our head makes us think that we are in control, even when we are not.

In order to be more productive, it’s essential that we start our day by decluttering our mind – either by writing down all our thoughts or by meditating.

This would give us more mental space to concentrate on our work, eventually making us more productive.

Mistake 2 – Not Knowing Where To Start.

It’s important to know where to commence from, to enhance our productivity. While most of us are more efficient early in the day and that’s our peak productive hours, many people prefer to start late and utilize the night time, when their concentration levels soar up.

No matter whether you’re an early morning person or a late night one, it’s important to set achievable goals and know where to start from, so that you can complete the important tasks in time.

If you lack a set plan, you’ll end up wasting time and that’ll hamper your efficiency & productivity.

Mistake 3 – Trying To Multitask.

On today’s date, we all feel there’s so much to do and so little time that we usually end up multitasking.

But to say the least, multitasking isn’t a good practice and often lowers our productivity, rather than boosting it.

When we take up multiple things at one point in time, we can’t fully concentrate on any of those and end up in a mess, or even worse, leave things unfinished.

According to a Stanford Research, multitaskers are terrible at filtering out irrelevant information, which means that even if we’re making a mistake, there are chances that we might not just notice it.

Thus, it is always advisable to take up one thing at a time, finish it and move to the next. This will ensure better results, always!

Mistake 4 – Taking Up More Work Than You Can Actually Do!

We often struggle to say ‘NO’ to others – and if you are someone who always has a plateful of things more than what you can consume, I completely understand your struggle.

Having a super workload can lead to poor performance, stress, anxiety, and low morale.

Or you might be someone who likes to control and manage all the work by themselves – being a micromanager – because you can’t trust anyone else to do it perfectly.

Either way, you’ll feel burdened after a point in time, which will adversely affect your productivity, draining all your energy and leaving you with sloppy results.

Hence, it’s sensible to take up only as much as you can handle, and put in your best efforts in completing that task.

Mistake 5 – Working Yourself To Exhaustion.

Drawing lines from the previous point, I have to tell you that when you take up more than you can do, you’ll lead yourself to exhaustion!

To put it in the words of Jeff VanderMeer, “Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.“

When you push your brain to overwork, it’ll eventually zone out while you’re still trying to use it!

Remember that our brain isn’t a machine, and it needs adequate rest & reboot to function properly.

If you feel fatigued or struggle to concentrate, having a foggy-head and lack of focus, opt for a break – listen to some music, take a power nap, go for a walk or make yourself a cup of coffee.

Mistake 6 – Not Taking Enough Breaks.

While our usual work hours tend to stretch between 8 to 10 hours approx, it has been proved that a human brain can be fully productive for just 5 hours daily.

It is essentially impossible for anyone to continuously concentrate, keep the focus intact and produce high-quality results without giving the brain (and the body) adequate rest and time to recharge.

While ‘break time’ is often considered as the time wasted, I would say that it helps in rebooting your brain, enhancing your creativity and pushes you to start afresh.

If it gets hard for you to take breaks, you can schedule them for yourself by putting an alarm or a reminder.

Take a walk or a power nap, meditate or listen to calming music. Keep your phone away while taking breaks between work, because scrolling through the social media feed wouldn’t really help you in any way!

Mistake 7 – Lacking Passion For The Work.

If you don’t love what you do, you can never be fully productive. If you’re dragging yourself in doing what you need to, maybe you’re striving for the wrong goal?

Don’t sign up for a work which doesn’t align with your interests. Your parents might want you to become a doctor/ lawyer/ engineer etc., but if you wish to be a footballer, then you’d never be able to wholeheartedly work towards the path you’ve chosen to fulfil someone else’s dreams!

Find your passion and turn that into your profession, so that when you get to work, you’d enjoy every second while doing it.

As Benjamin E. Mays once said, “The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”

Mistake 8 – Not Setting Deadlines.

Giving ourselves too much time can disrupt the flow of work. Without a time frame, it is possible that the completion of the task might just get delayed or extended unnecessarily. Thus, it’s essential to have a deadline for every task you take up.

Having a deadline will not just give a push to finish the work in the given time, but also accelerate your time management skills.

Now that you have identified your mistakes, you know what exactly to do to be more productive if you want to progress.

Don’t strive for perfectionism, instead put in your best efforts and you’ll see the results to be as desired.

Also, choose goals you’re passionate about, and don’t let anything stop you from achieving them!

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