Workday Pitfalls that Sink Your Productivity and the Easy Steps You Can Take Now to Catapult Forward, Make Steady Progress, and Reduce Stress

Multi-tasking pulls you in SIX different directions.

You get BURIED under an avalanche of paper.?

You get dragged under by a WAVE of new email.

As a result, you’re diverted from your most important priorities. ?

Time leaks out of your day and in trying to "do it all," you get nothing done.

Having this kind of workday can make you feel self-conscious… and anxious… both adding to your stress.

If it seems to be harder than ever to stay focused and get the RIGHT things done that matter the most, your daily routines and processes—or the lack thereof—might be to blame.

Through the years, you probably established habits in your workday to try to stay on time, stay focused, and get your work done.

But are all of your habits GOOD ones? …that WORK? Only you can say.

I bet that most of your habits were established so long ago, you don’t even remember how they got started.

Many were likely established through trial and error. You may have also followed the advice of well-known gurus or taken recommendations from well-meaning colleagues and friends.

But today, despite the many ways you’ve used in the past to try to keep up and stay on track, the workday mayhem continues, and it might be pulling you BACKWARDS no matter how hard you try to move forward.

Sometimes, you may feel like you’re being PULLED through your day by what happens next.

And every day, you fall short of your own expectations. You don’t reach the targets you were shooting for, and you feel less effective, more stressed, more reactive, and less intentional than ever.

Yuk.

When you find yourself going backwards instead of forwards, there are many ways to improve your daily routines to AVOID the most common mistakes most professionals make.

When you’re successful at avoiding these productivity pitfalls, you can stay focused, stay productive and continue to make steady progress as you accomplish your most important tasks at the right times.

Productivity Pitfall #1: Running Your Day Like a Short-Order Deli

Are you “living from your Inbox,” answering email after email as they roll in?

Feels like you’re hitting baseballs from a pitching machine in a batting cage, doesn’t it?

Same goes for to-dos. Do you try to complete tasks as they show up, one after the other?

“First come, first served!” …like making sandwiches for customers in a short-order deli.

It runs you ragged, leaving you breathless by the end of the day.

When you address tasks or emails as they appear, just because they’re in your face and you’d rather NOT put one more thing on your to-do list, it’s a routine that ignores the level of priority for each task and email.

You’re treating them equally, as if they hold the same level of importance, which isn’t true.

When you work this way, you know how much time passes—and how QUICKLY!

You let the never-ending stream of calls, texts, emails and visits PULL you through your day and before you know it, you realize you never accomplished the BIG priority you wanted to do. Or you didn’t take care of a few of your MOST important tasks that needed to be done.

You can avoid this misstep by managing your day with a REAL plan.

Create a central, digital task list in your computer—NOT a task app on your phone. That won’t cut it.

That to-do app on your phone is just a digital version of a legal pad. It’s still a stand-alone to-do list and not connected to anything else, making it REALLY hard for you to keep track of tasks coming from more than TEN difference sources in your day.

Use the task list in your email system. When set up properly for managing tasks, it becomes “Mission Control” for documenting, planning, prioritizing, and accomplishing everything you need to do. THEN you can sync it with your phone.

Instead of managing tasks AT their sources (remember, there are MORE than ten!) and instead of using a variety of tools to try to keep track of them, set up ONE central, digital location that can hold ALL of your tasks, no matter where they came from or when you’ll take action.

Then you can free yourself from paper to-do lists, post-it notes, planners, notebooks, white boards and to-do apps.

You can clear your desk instead of leaving papers and files out as reminders of things to do.

It also means not using your email Inbox as a to-do list or trying to rely on your memory either.

When you build a task list completely and keep it up to date, you can always trust and rely on it. As priorities shift in your day—and they always will!—you can feel confident in reprioritizing and pivoting quickly to change course, because you know you won’t be missing, losing or forgetting anything.

Imagine having a “Mission Control” that gives you 100% visibility of what you’re responsible for, allowing you to plan more easily and prioritize more accurately.

Imagine accomplishing tasks QUICKLY(because they’re designed in a way that makes it EASY), allowing you to make incredible progress on what REALLY matters.

Imagine how nice it would be to proactively DECIDE how you’ll spend your time—because you’ll have more of it, instead of racing against the clock every day.

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Productivity Pitfall #2: Letting Things Build up

Do you ever review a new piece of information—whether physical or digital—and then close it or put it down and move on without doing anything with it?

You might pick up a new paper or file and put it down again on your desk. You might open and close an email and move on to the next. You might receive a phone call, but don’t do anything with the notes you made on your legal pad after you finished the call.

You’re in a rush, you don’t feel like thinking about it, or you don’t know what to do with it.

It could be any or all of these reasons—and many more—and as a result, items start building up.

Whether emails, papers, files or to-dos, if you by-pass one and move on to the next without thinking through what you REALLY need to do with it, you’re just making it harder on yourself to manage those items in the future. And you WILL see them again, because you’re creating a build-up, which will ultimately slow you down.

Build-ups of information, whether physical or digital, will steal time from you. You’ll have to revisit many items two, three, four or more times to see what you need to do. Plus, you’ll have a harder time of finding things, because the more you keep, the more you have to sift through to find what you need.

You can avoid this pitfall by adding a missing ingredient to your daily routine…

DECISION MAKING.

What matters most is making a DECISION when you’re looking at something—the first time—whether you’re dealing with tasks, email or information.

Make a decision about what happens next and where it should go.

For reference information, make a decision about what’s really useful to you. Keep what’s useful. Get rid of what’s not.

The reference information you decide to keep should be moved into the best location or system for storing that specific type of information and it should be stored in such a way that you can find it again quickly and easily.

If the information represents a task, it’s best managed in ONE central, digital task list. (Hint: the one in your email system. NOT in a task app on your phone.)

Avoid leaving anything where it first appeared or arrived.

Inboxes are called “inboxes” for a reason. They are there to collect what comes in, but those items are not meant to stay there. NOTHING is best managed while it's still sitting in an inbox.

Make more decisions more often and keep your progress moving forward steadily and consistently.

Imagine how much time you’ll get back that you were previously spending addressing tasks, emails and information that you had ALREADY seen multiple times, but didn’t do anything with.

Then imagine what could you DO with that time.

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Productivity Pitfall #3: Letting a Posse of Bandits Steal Your Time

Do you ever feel like interruptions lead you through your day and you follow them like bread crumbs down a path from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm—or later!—and before you know it the day is completely GONE?

Interruptions and distractions are BIG time-bandits that will surely rob you of productivity and progress. Notifications are also robbers. And multi-tasking is a trickster... a robber in disguise.

All of these pose MANY threats to your productivity, the least of which is the time lost due to the interruption itself, which is only the beginning.

What they do is cause a domino effect that can turn your day into a whirlwind of REACTIVITY—or complete chaos.

They can cause you to abandon your original plan for the day, which will surely prevent you from making progress on the MOST important tasks you needed to do.

And at the end of the day, you feel more frustrated than accomplished and more stressed out than satisfied.

But there is good news.

You can avoid being ROBBED by these time bandits by proactively CHOOSING how to spend your time—AHEAD of time.

You’re in charge and you don’t have to accept every intrusion just because it occurs. And some interruptions can be prevented altogether.

You CAN turn away from the phone or from email for periods of time. You CAN ask a visitor to come back later—or better, schedule a time that works for both of you.

And, in the future, you can actually plan your day—and be WELL prepared before the unexpected hits you!—and add in new routines that will reduce or alleviate certain interruptions to begin with (like notifications.)

When you want MORE time, you must first have awareness of where it’s going right now and how it’s being used—or if it’s being lost, wasted, or stolen.

And understand that HAVING more time to spend on the things you need or want to do won’t result from trying to find it, make it, keep it, look for it or get it.

You already HAVE time.?But if you feel like you NEVER have enough time or you’re always LOSING it, the only way to gain it back and benefit from it is to learn how to PROTECT it.

Here’s what you can do…

Block time on your calendar early on in the morning AND in the afternoon (HINT: right after lunch!) for at least an hour (or more if you can get it) and establish this on a recurring basis for every day, ad infinitum.

Then move individual blocks around to accommodate your existing commitments and the new requests on your time. Don’t delete these blocks, if possible, because you NEED this time to work on tasks, process email, and move projects forward.

Once time is protected on your calendar, then you must protect THAT time from being interrupted, wasted or from being lost altogether. You need quiet time to keep your focus and finish what you start.

One way to do this is to avoid the all-day, open-door policy. Other people with whom you work need your time, yes, but set boundaries and make sure you keep a fair bit of time for yourself.

When you do, you’ll feel REALLY good about accomplishing one or more important tasks in one sitting, from start to finish.

Another way to protect your time is by turning away from email, phone calls and texts, and turning OFF those alerts and notifications for a period of time.

Let calls go to voice mail once in a while. And don’t check email every two minutes either. Allow yourself a stretch of time that’s ALL YOURS—quiet and uninterrupted—to get things done.

This is SO important to do, because if you stay reactive to what OTHERS deem important, then you’re not in charge of your time. They are.

And that means you’re not getting the time you need to accomplish what’s most important to YOU.

?To learn more about what's possible for your workday efficiency and productivity so you can have MORE time, LESS stress and an EASIER, more productive workday, visit https://productiveday.com or email Leslie directly at [email protected].