Avoid These 4 Productivity Killing Time Wasters

Wasting time is a problem for even the most successful people in the world.

The rest of us have a much worse time wasting habit. To get your productivity back, avoid these four activities:

Reading and Writing Personal Emails

Email has become an inevitable part of our daily lives, perhaps more so than even our cell phones or other means of communication. However email that isn’t directly related to the goals we are trying to accomplish during the day absolutely kills our productivity.

Personal email lures you in with the unspoken promise that you make to yourself that you’ll only spend 5 or 10 minutes reading it. But before you know it, you’ve read it twice, viewed the attached photos, and typed out a thoughtful reply, all of which ate up a full hour of your time.

Engaging in Gossip and Social Circles

The modern corporate office environment is one that is more open, literally and figuratively. That is to say, it is one in which people and their desks are situated in such a way as to create a more spacious and interactive workplace which leads to people being sucked into non-work related, productivity-killing personal conversations.

That being the case, it can be extremely challenging to distance yourself from the crowd and avoid the temptation to add your two cents to a juicy gossip session. Headphones with white noise or just an intensely increased focus on your work can help remedy this problem.

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Procrastinating

It almost sounds like an overstatement of the obvious but procrastination is one of the most common forms of time-wasting. Some of the world’s most successful people have admitted they have to fight like mad to overcome it. Rather than swearing it off--essentially impossible--a better and more realistic solution is to allow yourself no more than, say, 30 minutes of procrastination time per day and develop the discipline to do what you need to do.

Don’t Set Unrealistic Deadlines

If you try to accomplish something in three hours that you know in your heart is going to take five, you will likely end up staring down the clock, trying to win the race against time, and destroying either the quality or quantity of your productivity in the process. Allowing yourself sufficient time to handle tasks and accomplish your daily goals allows you to manage your time and your stress level better and will inevitably boost your productivity.