We are all very busy people. We get swamped by the workload, have to put in hours of work every day, have family commitments, and other types of commitments as well. Many people make the common mistake of believing that being busy also means being productive. There is a difference. As a result of the mistakes people make, productivity dips. Before you decide whether you need to increase your productivity, go through these 10 signs that will allow you to know whether you’re in trouble or not.
- You complain about being so busy. Being busy means going to the grocery store, doing chores, and a plethora of other things unrelated to your work. If you always complain about being too busy, you are not getting the important work done.
- You watch too much TV. I define watching 10 hours of TV every week as too much. Some people will nod their heads in agreement while others will get overwhelmed considering that the average American watches 32 hours of TV every week.
- You always fall behind. Everyone falls behind on their work at a certain point in their lives. I have fallen behind, and chances are you have fallen behind too. However, if you are always falling behind in your work and it is becoming a trend, you need to increase your productivity. If you keep on falling behind, you will spend the rest of your life catching up instead of expanding.
- You live in the 365 day mindset/trap. New Years resolutions. Did you forget about them? Over 80% of people never get their New Year’s resolutions accomplished because they believe they have an incredible amount of time to get the job done. Let’s say your New Year’s resolution is to gain 10,000 Twitter followers. That means you would have to gain an average of 28 followers every day. That’s not impossible at all. People think that if they wait a month and start on February, they can get the same goal accomplished by gaining 30 followers every day from now through the entire year. However, some people with this goal may wait to start on the first day of September because they realize they have a lot of time left. Now, there’s only 122 days to get the task accomplished which means someone would have to gain 82 followers every day from September 1st to the end of the year. It’s so much easier to start early and stick with it.
- You Google it too often. If you Google anything related to “how to,” it means you want to be able to do that. The person who Googles “how to make money online” 100 times wants to make money online. If you are Googling “how to be more productive” numerous times, then you need to boost your productivity. Instead of constantly searching for more ways to be productive, stick with the methods in this blog post and you will be fine. I’m a 16 year old in high school and the school’s track team. I think I’m qualified to talk about productivity.
- You would never think of waking up early in the morning. I’m a night owl and early bird at the same time. I get to bed past midnight and get up before 8 am. Waking up early in the morning allows you to be more productive because you have a greater chance of starting the day off with a positive attitude.
- You wing the first hour you wake up. The first hour of waking up dictates how the rest of your day is going to go. If you wake up and hold grudges for the first hour, you are going to hold those grudges and have a bad day. If you read a motivational book, do a workout, or do what you love, you will have a day filled with motivation and empowerment. The first hour controls how productive you will be for the rest of the day, and if you don’t know what you do then, you need to create a schedule for what you will do for that first hour.
- Do have too much on your plate. I had a score card overload, and I am not proud of it to this day. I wrote down 19 different goals on the score card that each took up a significant amount of time. I thought I would be able to write 20 blog posts, proofread an entire book, write a completely different book (and finish that book), do 10 YouTube videos, write 20 scripts, and prepare for the summer bootcamp my brother and I did at Fordham University (among plenty of other high level tasks) was an impossibility. I had too much on my plate and ended up being very unproductive for the entire week. Less is more because you get to focus more of your attention on fewer things.
- You are striving for the wrong types of goals. If your goals are having a house and being rich, that’s a problem. You need to set more specific goals so you are able to be productive. Instead of saying how rich you want to be, throw in a number. Do you want to make $100,000 by the end of the year? In addition, ask yourself what kind of a house you want and when you will get it. Do you want to move into a three floor house this year and live in a mansion five years later? More specific goals lead to more specific paths, and those specific paths lead to more productivity. Specific goals give you something to strive for.
- You read through this blog post word for word. Only 20% of people actually read the blog post (the other 80% stop short at the headline). If you have been reading this blog post word for word, then that means you are looking for some tidbits on being productive and asking yourself if you really need to be more productive. If you read up to this part of the blog post, chances are you need to be more productive.
Now that you know the signs that you need to be more productive, you need to increase that productivity as quickly as possible. Luckily for you, I wrote an entire blog post with 10 different methods you can use to increase your productivity. If you liked this blog post, then you are definitely going to like the other one as well.
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