Set Boundaries And Minimizing Distractions
Increasing your productivity doesn’t take a magic wand. It also doesn’t require you to get an advanced degree in statistics.
If you are struggling with a lack of productivity, you need to take a closer took at your daily habits. Being unproductive is nobody’s fault but your own.
Setting and meeting your deadlines is a huge part of whether or not you are productive or not. Setting deadlines and achieving them is an art that you can learn with some patience and practice.
Perfectionist Will Kill Your Productivity
Do you tend to set high bars for yourself and always try to put your best foot forward to achieve your goals? If so your perfectionism could be killing your productivity. While striving for perfection can help you achieve great results, it can also prevent you from being your best and can foster a lack of productivity.
Here are several ways being a perfectionist will quickly kill your productivity.
Perfectionism Makes You Less Efficient
When you strive for perfection in the tasks that you do, even when you’ve completed the task, you will linger on to find new ways that you can improve. This lingering process might start off as a quick ten-minute process but can quickly escalate until you find yourself spending an hour or more looking for things to improve. This causes you to spend way too much time on a task that require and puts you behind schedule.
You Become Less Effective
As a perfectionist, you probably do little things because they seem like a good addition. However, you fail to consciously think whether those additions are necessary. Sometimes, those additions not only fail to add value but might even ruin things.
You Tend To Procrastinate
When you have perfectionist tendencies, you often wait for the perfect moment. This tends to overcomplicate a project. What is a simple task, might get blown out of proportion, to the extent that it then becomes intimidating subconsciously. This causes you to procrastinate on working on it because you are waiting for the “perfect” moment before you begin. Unfortunately, this perfect moment never happens until it is too late.
You Miss The Bigger Picture
Since you are too hung up on the little details, you tend to forget about the bigger picture and the end goal. It isn’t uncommon to see better jobs in pruning the trees than the growth of the forest.
You Fuss Over Unfounded Problems
Most perfectionists tend to anticipate problems before then cop up and develop solutions to address the issues. It ends up becoming an obsession to pre-empt potential problems. Unfortunately, most of the problems that you envision never surface or they don’t really matters as much as you thought they would.
While striving to aim for higher standards isn’t a bad thing, when the quest for perfection turns into an obsession, it will quickly kill your productivity. The answer isn’t to stop striving for perfection. The answer is rather to be conscious of your perfectionist tendencies and manage them accordingly.
Minimizing Distractions To Get More Done
Being unproductive is nobody’s fault but your own. Here are some good tips on how to increasing your productivity. Things that you easily can incorporate into your daily life to minimize distractions and get more done during the day.
- Learn To Anticipate Yourself – When it comes to productivity, you’re your own worst enemy. According to a study by the University of California Irvine, office workers are only able to focus on a task for an average of three minutes and five seconds before they become distracted. Surprisingly, 44 % of those distractions are internal. The good is that internal disturbances are the only kind that you can control. Learn to know your patterns and plan for these distractions.
- Send Out Busy Signals – More than had of your distractions are external distractions that come in the form of email, people, phone calls, and chatter from other offices. If you want to stop these external distractions before they start you have to give out the right signals. If you utilize instant messenger, set yourself too busy and wear headphones, even if you aren’t listening to music. Providing subtle queues may seem passive aggressive, but trey will also save you from annoying distractions.
- Make Technology Work For You – At times, technology may seem like an enemy, but technology can be your anti-distraction buddy. Turn off your email alerts, create an auto-response to text messages, and set your phone to go to voicemail. Block out chunks of time on your calendar as “busy”. Unless you are dealing with life and death situations at work. Your coworkers will be able to manage without you for a few hours.
- Learn To Say No – If you are already overloaded with work and you feel like you never get anything accomplished, then you need to learn to say not to new requests and projects. You can nicely let people know that you would love to help, but your plate is currently full.
If you are starting to have more and more unproductive days, it is time for you to determine your distractions and put a stop to them. By being proactive, silencing technology, and learning to say no, you will find that you will start to become more productive.
Increasing Your Productivity
If you often find yourself wishing you could get more done, you are not alone.
Here are some simple habits that can help you increasing your productivity.
Keep Your Desk Decluttered – While creativity can arise from chaos, a litter-strewn office probably isn’t helping your productivity. When you have visible files lying about your office, it reminds you of an unfinished task. An unread book can be an invitation to procrastination. Keeping your desk organized and free of clutter can help you stick with a task for more than one and a had times longer.
Schedule Time To Read Email – Instead of checking your email every time a new one arrives in your inbox, schedule a time at the ends of the day to focus on this task. Monitoring and responding to emails right away is not only a great way to waste your precious time. It has also been linked to lower memory function, depression, anxiety, and lower performance. Set up an autoresponder that lets people know that you check your emails every day and will respond as soon you have red the email.
Rise Early – If you meant increasing your productivity, then you need to get up early. When you get up early, you have the opportunity to establish a good morning routine that will help you improving your productivity. Rising early allows you to have the time in the morning to prepare for the day ahead without being late or rushing to get to work.
Focus On What Is Important – Take five minutes in the morning and read over your goals and remind yourself what you are working toward. Not only will this help your to focus on what is important. Ut will also give you a gauge to measure your to-do-list. Doing this will allow you to look at your to-do-list with a renewed focus to make sure that you have at least one daily action that woks toward your broader goals.
Increasing your productivity doesn’t take a lot of extra work or more extended hours. By incorporating these habits into your daily routine, you can start to get more done in less time.
Closing Up
Everybody would like to be able to accomplish more throughout their day, but increasing your productivity can often seem impossible.
Perfectionists sometimes have difficulty being productive. This because it can often be difficult to draw the line when it is good. When to be satisfied. As a perfectionist, learning to set boundaries and endings can be more productive. Follow the strategies above and you can double, even triple your productivity.
If you just have started your business and are a totally newbie, I recommend you to read my blog post “7 Startup Tips For A Successful Online Business”
If you find that you lack productivity, consider incorporating these strategies into your daily life can help you to increase your productivity dramatically.
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