5 habits that are preventing you from being productive...

On average, humans spend about 1000 a year just scrolling on social media. That only equates to about 2.5 hours a day and is only one of the time-wasting tasks that we do in our day. Now imagine if you had spent those 1000 hours on something else? How many more things could you have accomplished this year?

In order to work on our time-wasting habits, we first have to identify them. So let’s chat about the 5 most common time-wasting habits that are eating into our productivity daily and discuss how we can unlearn them!

I actually created a YouTube video about this topic so ​if you’d rather watch that, click here!​

Endless scrolling

We all get caught up in a doom-scrolling session here and there. I get it! I’ve been there too. Instead of blaming ourselves each time we catch ourselves scrolling, we have to realize that social media companies spend millions of dollars each year trying to perfect the ‘addictive characteristics’ of their apps so that we’ll do exactly that.

Think about how many engineers, designers, and researchers are tasked with finding out just how to tweak the app so that it becomes harder and harder for us to stop. How are we supposed to fight against that?!

Instead of adding more shame to our lives around this habit, put your energy towards finding ways to break the cycle. I personally love the app Opal. Opal is a free app blocker that you can use to schedule downtime on your phone. Once you have your apps blocked, you won’t be able to access them until the designated amount of time has gone by.

Just like with building new habits, unlearning old ones follow the same patterns. If you’re able to keep it simple and make it easy for yourself not to fail, the repetition of success will form new neural pathways in your brain to help you alter the way you go about your habits.

Unintentionally consuming content

It’s important to note that I’m not saying we should stop consuming content altogether (unless that’s something you’d like to achieve, then power to you!) Instead, learn to shift your mindset around content—what can you learn from it? How can it improve your life?

One of the best things I’ve done for myself this year was training my algorithms to show me content that adds value to my life. To do this, start searching for topics that you’re interested in. How to edit videos? How to be more productive? How to manage your time better?

Thinking of your endless to-do list as your daily to-do list

I used to seriously struggle with this. I would always get trapped in a vicious cycle of building out an endless to-do list, getting overwhelmed and burnt out trying to finish it all, fall behind with work because of it, and then coming back to face an even longer to do list.

To combat this, the best soft skill to learn is prioritization. ​I wrote an entire article on the using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks​, so check that out if you haven’t seen it!

Living with decision fatigue

Are you sick of hearing me talk about time-blocking yet?! I mention it in so much of my content because it’s one of the most effective productivity strategies that I’ve implemented into my life. When we have a long laundry list of tasks and limited time in our day, it’s easy to feel paralyzed by having to choose what to do first. I find myself in that situation too often.

By combining prioritization and time-blocking, I’ve found that it helps to eliminate decision fatigue throughout my day so that I never have to worry about not knowing what I should be doing.

Thinking that you can only start things on the hour

If you have a task scheduled for 9 am but suddenly you find it’s already 9:15 am, what’s your first reaction? For many, their gut reaction is to think “ah well, I’ll just start at 10!” Most of us are built with an “all-or-nothing” mindset and that can often show up in the way we work. Instead of looking at your schedule or calendar as rigid instructions, learn to roll with the punches!

I like to use the ‘5 minute rule’ when I'm procrastinating. (Cause that is what’s really happening when you push tasks back—you’re procrastinating!) If things are feeling hard or you’re feeling resistance when it comes to moving onto the next task, tell yourself you’ll just do it for 5 minutes. Now does it still feel hard?

Often times productivity content talks about what we can add to our lives to make it more productive. So look at this as a little challenge to start looking at some of the things in our lives that we could unlearn or remove in order to grow.

Hope this helps!