4 Things Working Against Your Productivity

Last week Kivi and I presented a webinar on peaceful time management solutions – emphasis on “peaceful.”

We didn’t want to just share a list of tools and best practices on productivity, but wanted to get you to look at your time management in a completely different way.

One of the big things we wanted to focus on was how so much of today’s culture is designed to work against your productivity. There is a battle going on for your attention, focus, and energy. You need to be aware of that before you can tackle any time management issues you may have.

Here are four of those forces working against you:

1. The Myth of Multitasking

Our brains are not designed for multi-tasking. And yet, we proudly declare we are multi-taskers in job interviews or in meetings.

But we aren’t really multi-tasking, we are just jumping from one task to another back and forth over and over again until we maybe complete a few of the things we started.

Unfortunately, studies have shown when we multi-task, we are more likely to make mistakes and we are less efficient. Stress hormones are also released when we multi-task.

You can learn more about the dangers of multi-tasking in my post 9 Tips to Help You Celebrate Single-Tasking Day This Year.

2. Capitalism and Toxic Productivity

United States culture is very results oriented. The best qualities in a business are growth and speed.

If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re told it’s because you weren’t working “hard” enough.

The truth is there will always be more work to do. You will never finish it all. You have to find out what your “enough” is.

Find out more in these posts:

• Toxic Productivity: Is There Such a Thing as Being Too Productive? By Kristina Leroux
• Are You Enough? When the Need for Self-Improvement Becomes a Bad Thing by Kristina Leroux
• Burned Out from Talking About Burnout by Kristina Leroux
• We Need to Talk about Our Toxic Obsession with Productivity by Vu Le

3. Software and Social Media Mind Games

Project management apps and social media especially are pushing you to spend more time on their apps or software. Whether it’s constant notifications or infinite scrolling, they want you to stay on their app.

Time spent on these platforms is a widely tracked metric used for ad buys and investor reports. This means the more time you spend on them, the more money they make (but the less time you spend actually working).

4. Nonprofit Martyr Culture

You are expected to make less, but do more because you work for a nonprofit. Your passion for the mission is what is supposed to sustain you. If you push back, you are told you don’t care enough about the children, environment, sick people, your community, etc.

For more on this, see Kivi’s post Cutting the Workaholic Martyr Crap Starts with You.

As you can see, the odds are stacked against you to be productive. Stop judging yourself when you can’t manage your to-do list. Focus on your capacity and not your productivity.