Five habits that can make you unproductive

Habits are so important in determining how productive we turn out to be on a daily, weekly, monthly, and eventually, yearly basis.

For some, their habits will cause them to be super productive while for others, the kind of habits they have will see that they have little to no productivity. Hence, one must scrutinize their habits to ensure that they’re leading them to be more productive and not vice -versa.

In this article, we’ll be running through five habits that cause unproductivity. But not to worry, if you have any of these habits, with the right attitude, will to change, and determination, you can rid yourself of them.

As a way of clarifying, unproductivity generally means not yielding results, benefits, or profits in an area of a person’s life – be it a career, mental state, or physical health. It also means not capable of producing.

What are some habits that cause you to be unproductive?

•  Procrastination

If looking at the above word already makes you feel weak, it’s safe to assume you might actually be a procrastinator. Stings right? Right. One of the ripple effects of procrastination is mental stress. How, you might want to ask?

Putting off tasks no matter how little or big will mostly put you under torture. And this feeling of torture will in turn cause you stress mentally since you’re constantly weighed down with thoughts of those unfinished tasks.

Carrying around this torturing mental stress will divert your attention from other tasks which you should be focusing on and this could cause you to go about these newer tasks haphazardly or terribly.

• Over-Committing (Always Saying “Yes”)

It‘s always a good idea to commit to helping others. However, over-committing can become a huge problem for a person since they could come under pressure with having so much to do for people they have committed to.

To be honest, it can be exciting and gratifying saying “yes” to people’s requests and I guess it’s completely normal. However, if you find yourself constantly running into the risk of over-committing, you can do a simple exercise of not saying “yes” immediately.

Instead, respond to a request with, “Please give me a while to give your request some thought.” By saying this, you set yourself to take time to think over a request if it fits into your schedule.

•  Unhealthy Listening Habit

One of the unfortunate realities of this era is the defect in basic communication skills among humans. One of such skills is good listening. You’d be amazed to learn that most people hardly listen well. Most of the time, we’re just in a haste to air out our opinions or views or make an intelligent argument that we forget to actually listen to the people in our lives.

And while this defect opens up major cracks in our relationships, it’s also a huge cause of unproductivity in every area of our lives.

In the workplace, for instance, a lack of listening properly can cause us to put out unsatisfactory work since we do not even listen to our superiors attentively. Of course, this could eventually be a bad look.

•  Being Easily Distracted

It’s almost as if everything around us is built for distraction. Cell phones, computers, gadgets, social media, etc are just a few examples of common distractors. You could, for instance, open your Instagram app to search for a client and end up on Reels, doom scrolling for hours.

Of course, this only translates to a waste of precious time that should have been put into other profitable tasks. Distractions are real and the best we can do is control our reaction to them. However, if a person is easily distracted, this could pose a real problem to their level of productivity.

• Starting Your Day Without A Plan

Starting off your day without a plan is like travelling without a destination. Most of us are guilty of just jumping into our day without action points or a plan of what we’ll be doing.

This is problematic as we can be easily distracted, unfocused, and definitely unproductive. I’m of the opinion that having a plan for your day can be as simple as having a mental picture or advanced as having a visual representation of one’s plans for the day. The idea is just to have a sense of direction for which your day will go.