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Do you struggle with procrastination? Or feel like you should have gotten more done than you did on any given day? It’s a common problem. The American Psychological Association reports that roughly 20 percent of American adults admit to procrastination. Maybe you do it consciously, and you’re well aware of those moments you choose to re-organize your pantry instead of doing the work you need to be doing. Or, maybe you only realize it’s happened retrospectively. The time frame in which you were meant to finish something lapses and you’re nowhere near done. But, you don’t know why. Where did that time go?
There are a lot of things pulling at our attention and reducing our ability to focus at any given moment. And even if you want to squeeze the most productivity out of every moment, you might consistently find yourself behind. And then, your work and other tasks can bleed into your much-needed self-care and relaxation time. If you want to win that time back, identifying what’s standing in your way of being productive is key. Here are the hidden productivity killers robbing you of your time.
1.) Multi-Tasking
This seems counterintuitive because we’ve come to see multi-tasking as a way of getting more done. But, what actually happens is that you fail to ever get into a groove with any given task. Your mind needs a moment to acclimate to a given task before it really starts doing its best work. If you continuously switch tasks, you never give your brain the time to operate at peak efficiency. Research published in Atlassian shows that it can take nearly 10 minutes to get back into a workflow when you so much as switch between apps. You’re better off completing one task before moving on to the next.
