5 Sneaky Ways You Unconsciously Sabotage Your Productivity

There are millions of articles, books, blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcast episodes on how to be more productive…

Only… the mere fact that you’re learning about so many different approaches and, oftentimes, conflicting strategies can lead to the very thing you’re trying to work on.

And, before you know it, you find yourself in analysis paralysis… OR… you’re trying to implement every new strategy that comes up… only to wind up less productive than you were BEFORE you learned all of these ‘new’ productivity strategies.

Sound familiar?

And I’m speaking from experience. I’ve gone through seasons of my life where I pivoted from guru to guru, productivity model to productivity model, always hoping that the next ‘expert’ would give me the next best way to organize my life and become massively productive.

But, the context switching of learning every new approach wasn’t at all productive… and the confusion of wondering which strategy was actually the right strategy for me led me to, more often than not, dabble in a lot of things but not laser in on any one thing.

So I’m not going to give you ‘productivity strategies’ in this article. There are too many to name and only you know what creates the environment in which you’d be most productive.

What I am going to do in this article is talk about the 5 ways that you are, in fact, sabotaging your own productivity. These are sneaky, quiet things we all do that seem pretty harmless but, in fact, end up becoming the destroyer of our productivity.

Here are 5 ways you unconsciously sabotaging your productivity:

1. You finalize To-Do lists before you accurately assess AND schedule in To-Do time.

Far too often, we set monthly, weekly and daily goals without first stopping to ask “How much time will achieving this goal take (ballpark)? How much time can I give this goal each month, each week and each day? Where will my dedicated time to consistently work on this deliverable come from?” Unless you actually have the time to complete the DMAs (Daily Massive…