Productivity Blockers
You put in many hours, but you are not be getting significant results over the time you have given. This could be either you get easily distracted, or you start working on something else in the middle. It would help if you worked on your productivity, and there may be habits you have which are hindering your productivity. Here is a list of most common productivity blockers which you can change and implement into your life straight away
Avoidance of time management
If you keep your options open for too long, this puts you in a passive position. This prevents you from prioritising all of the work you have to do in a given day, leaving the critical decisions to fate. Keeping things to chance will only mean you lose your momentum on things and primarily your focus. Plan your week, so you know which items are needed to get done on what day on a priority basis. Don’t just stop at planning for one week. Instead, it would be best if you continuously were reconsidering your options throughout the week and the weeks to come.
Unrealistic Expectation
In an attempt of solving everything at once, you may set unrealistic expectations. Planning is always a good start, but you should not overestimate your future self. It could be that you’re putting these impossible expectations because you feel like you’re always behind at work or even in life in general. In most cases, you are not, and your peers may even be in the same position as you. By realising how much work you are capable of, you only need to set the job which you can feasibly do in the allocated time. Otherwise, you are caught in a hyper-motivation cycle when setting the week, resulting in disappointments.
Lack of Focus on your work
You are either unaware of the importance of concentration or not actively training it. Your mind wanders continuously, and you get distracted easily because of it. You struggle to finish projects or achieve meaningful goals. You may even check your phone 50 times in a study session. There may be distractions all around you, but you need to always reevaluation your position whenever you have the urge to be distracted. Ask yourself “why you are doing this? What would be the result of this?” and when you answer them correctly, you will know the reason why you need to get back to work. You can further reduce your chances of becoming distracted by not having things, like your phone, distract you. Create an environment that is only suited to work and enable you to work rather than let your mind deviate elsewhere.
Superficial Reflections
Now we have been telling you always to be adapting your work to suit your needs for the current you or making sure you evaluate yourself to know what changes you need to make. You may do them, but you start to realise you aren’t getting as much of a significant result as you may have hopped. This could be because you only ever deal with surface-level problems and never address the real issues. You may “feel” productive without producing any tangible (or high quality) results. This would then lead to you addressing the same problems repeatedly, leading to stagnating your creativity and overall work ethos. You instead continue with work than to keep yourself busy but not productive. When looking at reflecting on yourself, you need to actively find out the underlying issues and create a system for resolving them effectively.
Ignoring your needs
In an attempt of overachieving or making you’re as productive as you possibly can, you are not paying attention to your basic needs. You do not nurture your body through healthy nutrition. You do not take enough time to rest and recharge your body for the next activity. This results in no energy left in your body, making you feel drained and uninspired to do work. You focusing only on work makes you unproductive it in the long run. Taking care of your body should always come first as a priority before anything else since it impacts how much energy you can deliver to those activities. Take care of yourself first before tackling any other work that needs to be done.