Bad Habits That Sabotage Your Productivity At Your Workplace
When you get to the office in the morning, you may grab a cup of coffee and head straight to your inbox.
From there you move over to Twitter and then drop some messages on Facebook. What comes to mind next, the latest Justin Bieber’s video on YouTube. Before you can realize what you are doing the day will be long gone. The funny thing is that when somebody calls, you go like: “Dude, I am so busy I can’t even talk”
There are many other habits that many of us have formed that do nothing but sabotage our productivity. Among these habits are:
Constant Checking Of Email Messages
The very first activity that most of us do in a day is to check email messages as soon as we reach the office. If the message requires a reply, we will obviously leave whatever we are doing and start writing a reply. It is best to check your email messages once or twice a day; say before lunch period or in the morning and just before you close for the day.
Meetings
Depending on the kind of meeting and how many hours it took, meetings can be a time suck as well. Why sit around and discuss things that can just be talked over the IM or email?
There are many databases online designed to facilitate productivity by reducing the usage of time wasting factors like weekly or daily meeting conversations. You can use Central Desktop, Basecamp or any other system that proves effective in providing you with a good alternative to these.
With most of these facilities, you can create and have access to detailed project milestones and deadlines.
Late Work
Many people work late with the idea of being ahead of their schedules. While this may be a good idea, after the days hard work chances are that forcing yourself to work further is imposing excessive stress on you.
This might get you sick and make you lose more productive hours. Instead of hanging around on people’s blog posts in the evening or forcing yourself to do more work, why not take the time and rest to get yourself charged for tomorrow’s deals.
Inadequate Management Of Your To-Do-List
From the experience I got by launching and running my coupon site, where I talked about iContact, VMWare coupon and Acronis software, I noticed that I would start my day with the easiest tasks and tackle the hard ones when my energy was already depleted.
Of course this was not a productive strategy. While you are prioritizing your tasks, don’t forget that starting from the hard tasks in the morning will help encourage you towards tackling the easy ones later in the day.
Too Much Coffee
The working routine of most people can be described with the phrase “half coffee, half work”. Instead of moving over for the next cup of coffee, put a soft music and try to focus on the work at hand.
Even if you are a coffee geek, keeping in mind that you will get a cup of coffee once you finish the task at hand will help to improve your productivity.
Taking Lunch Right At Your Desk
A lot of people try to impress their boss or force themselves towards being more productive by eating on their desk. Have you thought that you can mistakenly spill the food over important documents, or on your computer?
If this happens, you will lose the time you thing you have gained and even take more of your product hours to deal with the mess.
Social Site Madness
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all marvelous places to hang out and run business campaign. However, these sites have also proved to be time suckers. The key is to know what you are going there to do and get out once done. Any more second you stay can take you hours to realize the damage you have done to yourself.
Pleasing Everybody
There is no way you can please everybody around you. When you know that it is time to work and somebody around is either asking for help or for some conversation, tell the person that you are working.
Let him or her know when you will be free in case they are still interested. And most importantly, learn to say NO!
Guest Post By: Chimikolo Mike who is Freelance Writer and often writes about discount deals at coupon blogs that share acronis Coupon, icontact code discounts. Check out his coupon site that offers a free icontact coupon and acronis coupons.
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About The Blog Author
Alex Sysoef is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer and ProBlogger who shares his passion and knowledge of WordPress, SEO, Social Media and traffic strategies on his blog WordPress Howto Spotter. Connect on Twitter or Facebook
Totally agree! My wife is everything in this post! I have her read this and she goes,”That’s me!”
jlem1125 recently posted..Long Winter Dog Walks
I’m constantly checking my emails. It’s my own fault: I bought myself a blackberry phone.
Every time that little red blinking light goes off, I can’t help but read over whatever was sent my way. I think a good 10 hours are wasted on email each week (at least)!
Danielle Lynn recently posted..Bad advice for sales copy newbies
In today’s workplace people are working harder than ever, yet the results may not reflect this in a way that shows increased productivity. Part of it may be due to a lack of focus on getting results. And part may be because bad habits keep us from succeeding.
Getting results requires focusing on only that which matters. Self help author and motivational speaker Brian Tracy describes what he calls the “law of three” in business management. According to this law, aside from the three most important tasks or results you want to achieve, everything else contributes just 10 percent of actual results.
Unfortunately, most people spend 90 perecent of their time on activities that contribute very little and then wonder why they are making so little progress.
Typically, it’s one primary result with two supporting results that are essential in order to succeed in achieving the first. For example, the first could be sales volume, while the second and third would be effective marketing to attract qualified prospects and effective selling to convert prospects into customers.
Next you need to eliminate all the “busy work” you end up doing each day that gets in the way of focusing all your time and energy on these three results 90 percent of the time.
Take a critical look at your job description. Does it acurately reflect what the company needs you to do in order to succeed in your three most important results? If not, see if you can refine it and then present this to your manager. You are not looking to be confrontational, but you want to ensure your time and energy is used to produce results the company wants and needs from you.
The other side of the equation has to do with your own bad habits that may get in the way of reaching results. This is where you have to take an honest appraisal of yourself and identify what you do habitually that keeps you from staying focused on your three results.