Why Your Productivity Isn’t Where You Want It to Be

Psychological mistakes that hurt your productivity

You’ve probably noticed that in spite of your best intentions, you often manage to only accomplish a little real work each day. Research shows that only about one in four people leave work at the end of each day having completed the tasks that they planned to finish. It’s common for people to feel as if they’ve been busy all day, but still haven’t got around to the things that matter.

While you don’t want to be a work machine, it does feel good to be efficient, to solve key problems, and to reach important goals. If you aren’t sure why you’re unable to get there, the answer could be that you make one of several common psychological mistakes that hold you back.

You’re overconfident about how much productive time you have each day

Creative conceptualizing, planning, and skill-building, all require your undivided attention for hours together. You might head to work each morning believing that you have 8 to 10 hours to focus on the things that you really care about, and plan your goals accordingly.

For many, however, their entire day is taken up by email, quick conversations with colleagues, and so on. There’s some research to suggest that the average person has no more than 72 minutes of undisturbed time each day.

It can be a serious productivity buster to overestimate the amount of quality time you have each day for directed work. If you go in with a realistic idea of how much uninterrupted time you have, you’ll be able to use it to focus on your most important goals, rather than the ones that matter less.

You dismiss workable productivity strategies as too simplistic

If you’ve read self-help books on how to be more productive, you’ve probably come across the idea of implementation intention — the concept in psychology that looks at how people stand a better chance with their goals if they take care of the logistical steps involved ahead of time, or think about how they’ll manage to devote time to any problems that come up.

Similarly, you might have read about how making fewer unimportant decisions through each day could set you up for greater energy for the decisions that matter.

Many people however, when they read about these recommendations, tend to dismiss them as simplistic old hat. They never give it a chance. The truth, however, is that many of the most useful and effective ways to get ahead do tend to be deceptively simple. Dismissing a potential technique as simplistic can be a serious productivity mistake.

People often tend to look away from simple methods because they don’t look impressive enough, or because they see themselves as special and unique — they can’t stomach the idea of how a simple-sounding method could help someone like them. Applying simple, but proven productivity methods to your life can be a great way to move forward.

You tend to see that huge shifts are necessary for enhancing personal productivity

Most people have a vague conception of how changing some habits could help their productivity, but tend to experience psychological resistance to change. You may, for example, suspect that getting a couple more hours of sleep each night would help you be more productive, but you may resent having to make the changes required because you enjoy watching late-night movies or poking around your phone instead of going to bed.

While the idea of changing these habits all at one go may feel overwhelming, starting with little steps could make sense for you. You could, for example, begin by resolving to help your mind to transition from work to sleep by devoting the last half-hour of each workday to drawing up plans for the following day.

Once you get home, you could set your home lighting to soften automatically a half-hour before you wish to go to bed, too, to gently make your mind more amenable to the change. While you may not be able to go along with the idea of getting into bed two hours before you usually do, making these smaller changes that psychologically help you get ready for bed a half-hour earlier could get you off to a good start. A low-profile change can often get you ready for bigger changes down the line.

You allow yourself to lose touch with certain rarely used skills

If you do something every day, you tend to develop an efficient method for getting it done. If there’s a skill that you only need a couple of times a year, however, you’re likely to forget parts of how to do it, and fumble, wasting precious time.

For instance, you probably don’t need to clean your printer drum more than a couple of times a year, so you might forget the steps involved, each time, and hunt for instructions, wasting time. You could, however, download instructions once, and save them in an easily found email to yourself.

The idea should be to recognize each one of these infrequent tasks when they turn up, and write down instructions, or other important information such as model numbers, to ensure that you don’t waste time each time.

You mentally play down how costly minor wastes of time really are

Spending just a little time each day on building up skills or on projects that are important but not of immediate significance, may not take up much time, but, over the long-term, may dramatically improve your outcomes.

On the other hand, allowing small time leaks through each day doing unimportant things may result in outcomes far worse than you are likely to estimate. Maybe you spend a few minutes each day hunting for papers you need to take to work, or answering mail that doesn’t require your immediate attention. These tasks, however small they may be, drain your will to work, and get in the way of your flow.

It’s important to understand that doing away with small energy leaks by smoothing out everyday tasks, and delegating some things, can make for better mental health and strength. These steps can work, and lead to time savings and improved productivity.

If you aren’t as productive as you’d like, the reason may not necessarily be complicated. You may make common oversights in your psychological approach to productivity — psychological mistakes that hurt your productivity.

Being deliberate about avoiding the mistakes mentioned here may not solve all your productivity issues at one go, but they’re likely to give you a better grip over your time.