Are you getting your stuff done?
You drag yourself out of bed, usually late, check Instagram, go to work, start checking your email, start answering. Then, it’s noon. After lunch, perhaps you have some meetings. You start working at 3pm. Maybe later. Around six you are heading back home.
You’ve done anything decent.
Sounds familiar?
Managing your own time is in fact one of the main challenges of a person’s life. It’s easy to find yourself off balance.
What and How are necessary questions. But as Michael Breus says in The Power of When, there is another crucial question that must be addressed in order to make fast, dramatic, lasting improvements in the quality of your life across the board.
When is the ultimate life hack.
Knowing when enables to perform what and how to your maximum potential.
When it comes to productivity, hard work is half the battle. The first half—the crucial half—is planning well.
Here are five reasons why you’re not getting your stuff done.
1. Not prioritizing tasks.
Prioritize tasks by organizing the project by priority and sequence. Lay it out in front of you on paper or on a computer so that you can see it. Then go to work on one task at a time. You will be amazed at how much you get done in this way, says Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog.
2. Underestimating the effort something will take.
Not every task takes the same amount of time. To avoid this time-management mistake, Kimberly Medlock, author of What Not To Do at The Office, recommends jotting down the amount of time each task on your to-do list will take.
3. Managing distractions.
“Distractions are triggers to procrastination,” says Aho.
Procrastination is not just about procrastination. It’s about a fundamental dilemma between what is good for us now and what is good for us in the long term, says workplace psychologist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational.
4. Thinking tracking time is a waste of time.
Until you’re tracking your time, you can’t know what you can eliminate or simplify. You must be aware of what you are doing with your time.
5. Stop thinking that you can multitask.
“We’ve been trained [to think] that multitasking is the way to go. We’re told not to sit there and work on this one thing,” says Shawn Casemore, author of Operational Empowerment. While we think that by multitasking—answering emails, keeping the door open for colleagues to pop in when they feel like it, picking up the phone every time it rings—that we’re being super productive, but research shows that when we try to do multiple things at once, we are actually not being productive at all.
So better do one task at a time.