What is stopping us from being productive?
There are several factors that usually can prevent us from being productive. I personally think that I'm productive enough but on days when I'm not productive enough, I have a low feeling and that is when I give it a thought to understand how I can increase my productivity. I have been listening to Atomic Habits audiobook for the second time. The author talks about Habits and that too-small habits can create wonders. When I read the book for the very first time, I'm sure I missed a lot of things and I also enjoyed a lot of things. I'm listening to the audiobook once again to catch the missed parts.
My focus right now is on being more productive than what I'm already. In order to make myself more productive, I found out a few things that are currently disturbing me. I wanted to go through them in this article so that it can benefit someone else who would also like to be productive.
Procrastination
Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies for anyone I would say. We might want to do some activity or a task but we usually push it for later and keep doing that again and again and after a few days or after a point of time, we might identify that we are nearing the deadlines and have not done any progress. This is a very small procrastination mentality that we have. Not just me but I have seen this happening with my friends as well. And when I read stories online, I hear this from others too. Though it gives a good feeling that I'm not the only person with procrastination, I'm trying hard to get rid of that.
In order to solve this, I have been trying a method where I still procrastinate but whenever I think about a task, I get started with that and progress a little bit and procrastinate it for later. This gives me a better feeling than procrastinating on something completely. I have been doing this for some time now and it really helps a lot I should say.
Distractions
When I start working on a particular task, I usually get so many distractions. It can either be a physical distraction or a virtual distraction where someone would message me or have a conversation with me. Because of these distractions, I end up doing very less work compared to what I'm capable of doing. Even when I start working on my laptop, I have like 100 things open and I have to focus on everything, and in between all that I have to complete my task and deliver.
I actually started doing something to handle this problem. Usually, on my work laptop, I close everything else and have only the things that I'm currently focusing on. If I'm sitting and coding something I would have only two things open, one is the VS code editor and another is the browser where I see the output usually. This way my possibility for distraction is very less and finally I end up being productive.
Multitasking
Multitasking is another biggest problem. Many people say that multitasking is very bad but usually, we might have a feeling that multi-tasking can help us complete multiple works at the same time. Researchers say that it is not true apparently. If we start multi-tasking, mostly the primary task we do gets greatly affected. But instead, if we try doing something without any distraction or any other task in parallel, the focus will always be on one particular thing at a time and we would be able to achieve more productivity.
Distractions are also one of the reasons for multitasking. When we are doing some work and something else is distracting, we have the habit of jumping to the new task and getting back to the old task after the new one is done or sometimes we might as well do both things in parallel. Imagine doing something like 10 things in parallel. It will definitely affect the focus and sometimes can also affect the quality of the work that we are doing. So, it is always good to avoid multitasking and go one by one.
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Sometimes, multitasking is also a barrier to become productive. As much as we want to do more things we often ended up finishing nothing in a day. So it is better to focus on one thing at a time.