Four Productivity Myths to Avoid.

There are a lot of well-meaning tips and tricks related to productivity—many work, but most don’t.

They don’t work because they are focused on giving you ways not to do your work and instead show you how to organise it—missing the point entirely: to get the work done.

Here are four you need to be particularly careful about:

You should organise your to-do list by project.

No, you don’t, and anyone who uses the Time Sector System can attest to this.

This myth results from misunderstanding David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) book.

GTD is about managing your tasks by context (people, places, or things), not projects. In GTD, projects are managed in a separate project support folder. Today, that folder will likely be in a notes app or a folder on your Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud.

You can organise your lists in any way that works for you.

You should separate your personal and work tasks.

Where this comes from, I don’t know. I’ve been using some form of task manager for nearly thirty years, and I have never seen a system that suggests this.

A task is a task that needs to be done. For example, you can only talk to your bank during office hours. After work, you may need to respond to a work-related email or finish preparing for an important presentation.

Separating your work and personal tasks only creates more lists and complexity in your system. Keep all your tasks for the day together. You can use flags or tags for your daytime and nighttime tasks, but that should be as far as you go with separation.

Use a waiting-for folder/tag for things you are waiting for.

All waiting-for items are incomplete tasks. The fact that you are waiting for something means a task has not been completed.

If you have a task that says, “Ask HR for a new expense reporting sheet”, and after you send the email, you move the task from your task list to a waiting-for list, you are fooling yourself.

You want a new expense reporting sheet; that is the task. The task is not to send an email. Until you receive the expense reporting sheet, the task is not complete. Instead, reschedule the task for another day and use that as a reminder to check.

There’s a perfect system.

No, there isn’t. As with all things, there is no one-size-fits-all. The closest you will get to a perfect system is the one that works for you and is likely to be a hybrid of many different systems.

As with the apps you use, find one that best suits your work style and stick with it.

The never-ending pursuit of the ‘perfect’ will destroy your productivity because:

a) you will never find it, and

b) you will never learn enough about the app or system you use to get the full benefit of it.

And there you go. Avoid these four myths, and you will soon find yourself focused on completing your work instead of organising it.

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